Creating economic value in the US airline industry: are we missing the flight?

Prolonged periods of ineffective capital allocation and mismanagement destroy massive amounts of wealth and damage the economic wellbeing of the service and manufacturing industries. The purpose of this paper is to outlay the facts and figures that can illustrate the value destruction in the US airline industry for the period of 1990-1999. The EVA analysis for the last decade of the millennium demonstrated that even when the US economy was prosperous, the airline industry failed to benefit from this favorable environment.