Price discrimination is a selling strategy that charges customers different prices for the same product or service based on what the seller believes it can get the customer to agree to. In pure price discrimination, the seller charges each customer the maximum price they will pay. In more common forms of price discrimination, the seller segments customers into groups based on certain attributes and charges each group a different price.

Airlines famously work on razor thin margins. If they dont make their $ this way they need to charge more for the NYC full fare, and because all competitors do it it pushes those fares up. Which might be OK but what this means is skippers make it worse for people who legit follow the terms and conditions

My belief is people should honour the terms of the fare they paid for.

As for a parachute. That is silly. Of course that would add a lot of cost. A similar example is asking a bus driver to stop outside your house. Or let you jump out the open door. Lots of insurance and liability reasons not to do so.

The fact that fuel is the only aspect to a fare is obviously misinformed. It is like saying AWS only pay for data centre electricity.