As US travelers feel the brunt of inflation and increased airline costs, Delta Airlines CEO Ed Bastian revealed what it would take to drop ticket prices, pointing directly to a lack of market supply rather than fluctuations in fuel prices.
“People ask me all the time – what’s going on with the prices?” Bastian told Fox Business’ Maria Bartiromo in an exclusive interview Tuesday. “Prices will go down when we can fly more, when there’s more supply, it’s supply and demand. Right now we’re kind of stuck in a jam.”
“We can’t bring in a lot of supply because the air traffic control system is congested. As you open up the skies, and you bring in more flow, that will help with pricing and we will be able to bring more people to more places,” he said.
Commercial traffic in the key waterway is surging after months of rising prices due to the conflict in Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, after Trump and Iranian President Massoud Pezeshkian signed a 14-point memorandum of understanding last Wednesday aimed at ending the war. On Tuesday, President Donald Trump said that 19 million barrels of oil had flowed from the Strait of Hormuz a day earlier.
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“I think in the initial shock, you know, prices went up about 10 to 15%, not just at Delta, but across the entire airline industry. And I think that was probably the right level,” Bastian said. “Oil prices are down now, so I think we’re in pretty good shape.”
Delta CEO Ed Bastian visits “Mornings with Maria” in the Fox Business Network studios on June 23, 2026. (Getty Images)
However, Bastian revealed that rising energy costs directly impacted Delta’s bottom line by about $2 billion, forcing the airline to raise ticket prices.
“We had no choice,” he said, while also highlighting how accountability and regulation of government spending could also bring down ticket prices.
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“We’ve seen more progress in the last year and a half toward removing those barriers and getting aviation flowing more smoothly than we probably have in the last several decades. That’s very significant,” Bastien said.
“I hope, as an American people, we will continue to invest in that future. It’s probably the smartest investment we can make, because what we’re doing is, we’re making air flow more streamlined. We’re enabling people to not only be safe — safety is always our top priority — but (allowing) for more flights,” the CEO says, ultimately reducing customer costs.
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Maria Bartiromo asked Delta Airlines CEO Ed Bastian to assess the current K-shaped economy, noting strong spending among high-end consumers.
Bastian also discussed how Delta has achieved investment-grade ratings from all three major credit agencies, won back Berkshire Hathaway as a top shareholder and is expanding local operations such as “Delta TechOps” into a multibillion-dollar third-party maintenance powerhouse.
“Over the next few years we’re going to get to a point here where our balance sheet will be a strong balance sheet, something that had never really happened in our industry up to that point,” he said. “This is the industry that America holds up as the gold standard… so whether it’s Boeing, whether it’s our airlines, our aviation sector, our technical capability and know-how, we are the gold standard.”
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Fox News’ Greg Norman-Diamond and Emma Bassey contributed to this report.
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