is it just me, or is it becoming genuinely hard to find a finite priced trans-atlantic flight this summer?
to anywhere over the pond. I've done a fair bit of travel on these routes over the years and I don't ever remember prices this high or schedules this constrained
Do you remember a combination of oil being this high and the dollar this low?
Nope, but for US carriers the exchange rate should be a minor perturbation, and US internal flights are not up by such a large fraction.
I'd expect the oil prices to have a ~ 30% effect on tickets, and I'm not seeing even that on internal flights.
Ticket prices for international flights are set in competition with those of foreign carriers, which charge in GBP, EUR etc. A falling dollar gives US carriers charging in USD room for rises there. If their costs are not rising as quickly, so much the better for their bottom line.
In other words, it's not really international flights getting more expensive, it's you getting poorer.
$1400 from LAX to Munich this summer - ouch.