Airlines or drug development
I was due to fly from San Francisco to Boston on U.S. Airways with a late Sunday arrival. Yesterday I got to SFO to find out I'd somehow booked myself into a flight route that doesn't actually exist (U.S. Airways blamed Orbitz), followed up by my rebooked flight being pushed back twice due to mechanical issues and then finally cancelled. I had to take an overnight flight with a layover in Phoenix, putting me into Logan this morning at around 6 am. Bleary-eyed and exhausted, I felt more like I'd flown to Europe than Boston.
But as I waited in line to rebook in SFO, complaining passengers grousing all around me, I started thinking about what a troubled sector the airline industry is. Consider this: Fuel costs are rising, small "specialty" airlines are undercutting the biggest flyers, the internet has made it easy for anyone to compare flight costs, and weather wreaks havoc on scheduling. And anytime a flight is grounded, 200 passengers want to point fingers and shout.
So I did some looking. This editorial in the Washington Post points out that in the fall of 2005, nearly half of travelers in the air were on planes owned by airlines operating under Chapter 11. And this PDF from the Department of Transportation shows, among other things, the percent of time certain airlines arrive on schedule. U.S. Airways hits its mark a lowly 55 percent of the time into 81 reportable airports. That's last on the list (Hawaiian Airlines was first, at about 94 percent into 14 airports).
Not good. But stack that up against biotechnology: The Tufts Center pegs the cost of developing a drug to be more than $800M, (noted here in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery) and at least 10 years of work. That figure comes from dated research, though, and most put the cost today at around $1B. Burrill and Co. reports that the chance of a drug moving from preclinical work to NDA approval is less than 1 percent. The FDA is taking fire from the public and undergoing change. And the public markets are providing valuations that most biotechs find unappealing.
Looking at that, as troubled as airlines might be, it beats working in drug discovery.
