Why would it not be possible for an airline company to offer an all-first-class flight at commensurate rates, if there were a market for such a thing?
The commonizing of the space age has turned aircraft from wonders to a faster traveling form of Greyhound bus. And so progress goes.
We can thank deregulation for what little sanity the airline business still has. If it were completely run by the gummit now... it is to shiver to think about it.
But who cares, right? Brawndo's got what plants crave! It's got electrolytes!
Domestic bicycle manufacturing could be a viable industry again. Change the rules of the game (place tariffs on cheap, imported bikes; subsidize domestic bicycle makers, etc.) and suddenly there is "a market for such a thing".
The market is a guide, not a dictator. The choice of the majority of the buying public is not always right. By the free choice of the sandwich-buying public, McDonald's sells more food than the all-organic hippie sandwich shop down the street — but that doesn't mean McDonald's food is better than the organic sandwiches the hippies sell. In fact, the opposite is true: Big Macs will kill you if you eat enough of them. But thanks to advertising, an inferior product (the Big Mac) can be made to "satisfy" the customer more than a superior product (the tofu and goat cheese on rye) and "win" the economic game.
Free markets are supposedly regulated by independent persons acting in accordance with rational self-interest. That's a fine theory. Unfortunately, the average person is more or less incapable of reason, and thus is incapable of discovering his or her best interests. Instead, the average person acts according to their emotions — the way they feel at any given time.
And people who act in this way can never truly be independent persons; they are slaves to their nerve endings, childlike, credulous, and capable of being easily manipulated by advertising and peer pressure into making "free choices' about what to buy. Thus "billions and billions sold"; thus the sorry state of U.S. airlines today.
Several all-business-class airlines have been started; all have fallen victim to the rules of the economic game as currently played. In a contest where the game is rigged to favor the cheap over the good, it is impossible for the good to win.
There actually might be a market for such a thing. I understand there are some European airlines that offer this kind of service. I never heard of anything like it until someone else mentioned it to me.
The market isn’t there. It’s been tried several times, and each attempt a miserable failure.