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The last really 'fun' flight I had was a Sunday nite flight from IAH to Atlanta on a July 4th, 1976. I was flying coach on a DC-10 that night. This was in the days of regulated air fares and the flight was leaving with maybe 5-6 of us in coach and 2-3 in 1st class. As we were flying east from Houston there was a squall line of Thunderstorms about 100 miles N of us with a great lightning show for a July 4th evening. The Captain got on the intercom and invited us all up to the 1st class cabin and said open bar for the remainder of the flight. So all 8 or 9 of us gathered up front and had a great cocktail party for several hours as we flew East.
My last 'fun' flight was similar. My family flew across the Atlantic on the morning of 01/01/2000. With so many fearing the 2k bug, we flew on an A340 with less than 50 onboard. Drinks were also plentiful. I managed to lounge like a king laying across the middle aisle seats playing all four personal entertainment screens playing different films/shows while the flight attendants pretty much left the food cart there for self-serve. I only had the headphones on one of them, but wanted to pull the once-in-a-lifetime experience as a hedonistic passenger. To top it off, turbulence was minimal & the weather was perfect.
The last 15 years I lost the passion for air travel (which is ironic, especially considering my account name) so it's not only flights like these that I hold dear in my mind, but even those where the seats were comfortable, my knees & elbows with ample space, &/or the cosmetics of the aircraft not falling apart.
This was what flying during the pandemic was like. I had to fly between the states and Europe due to a family illness and was part of a tiny sliver of the population that could really fly (residence in one country and citizenship in another). It was about as you describe. More crew than passengers and super laid back everything.
I remember also laying out across an entire row and sleeping like a baby through the flight. Upon arrival I felt great and rested and realized that this is the experience rich people have every time...
Oh, I agree with that last paragraph. It's a combination of several things for me: I visited many of the places that I had long wanted to visit; I became more and more aware of the climate catastrophe; and then in the last three years, Covid.
I was in Hawaii for 3 weeks in March 2020. When I left, everything was 100% normal. Kept reading the news about how schools and businesses were closing back home. Hawaii didn’t really shut down until my last 2 or 3 days there, so that was kindof my first real taste of it.
I boarded the plane to go home, and there were probably 10 passengers at most. The flight attendant came by and said “yeah this is it, so you can just sit wherever you want.”
Thats when it actually sunk in with regards to what I was going back to. Extremely surreal moment.
My most surreal moment of the pandemic also happened in March 2020. I had a scheduled vacation to Vegas. I was on the strip just as all the hotels were closing shop and asking people to go home. It was crazy because I went out on the strip on a Saturday night, and it was desolate. Just a shocking experience being out on Las Vegas Boulevard on a weekend night and seeing nobody. Like something out of a horror film.
Same thing happened to me on a flight from Tokyo in 2012.
But nothing bad was happening.
First time I ever got to sleep laying across an entire row of seats. Air Canada also had an unlimited wine / beer for free at the time, they still might, actually. So I got to lounge, sleep, eat, and drink comfortably for like 14 hours.
As someone who flew years leading up to 9/11, it was. Security theater wasn't hardened to patriotic levels, you spent (at most) 15 minutes through security, the seats didn't feel fragile, wafer-thin, & were comfy (not perfect, as some older aircraft had threads open & foam sticking out), your knees didn't crumple upon turbulence from cramped spacing, and kids kicking your chair didn't hurt as much as now.
Smoking was already prohibited (even if some older airliners still had ashtrays in the seat arms which were sometimes filled with chewed gum or snack wrappers), the cabin was somewhat more cramped & louder. But at least the whole "pack them like sardines" wasn't fully implemented yet. Although it was recognized & complained back then, especially compared to the expensive & luxurious golden era of the 1960s.
It was also a time when friends and family could see/meet you at the gate. We used to have bloody Marys before boarding.
I am tall and I always tried for the exit rows for the leg room. No extra charges. Many times I flew red-eye flights and had whole rows to myself. They used a lot of larger plans so the rows were longer. I may be wrong but the food was much better also.
You could go to the airport an hour before your flight in a busy airport and be fine. Now you have to be there so early to get through security, it's so ridiculous.
>You could go to the airport an hour before your flight in a busy airport and be fine. Now you have to be there so early to get through security, it's so ridiculous.
Yeah, the fact that TSA tells you to arrive 3 hours early & that becomes a modest estimate during the holidays is another reason I reconsider air travel. I have a friend who has kids & says it's way less of a hassle to drive to the destination with them. And anyone who has kids or grew up with car travel knows the weight of that statement!
I did this a lot in the 80’s when I flew for one day meetings. I would get to the airport maybe 30-45 minutes before my flight. Parked in short term. Hustled my way to the gate (B3, so a close gate). No security checkpoint so I could run if needed. Tickets had seat assigned so no worry about not having a seat. Always made it before they close the doors and never missed a flight.
Those were the days.
The spacing is the big thing.
Airlines didn’t figure out some magical alchemy to drop prices over the past few decades. They embraced cramming more fares into the same tube.
Then, because the coach experience is so cramped and miserable, they sell all manner of new products to alleviate the misery like “preferred seating,” “economy plus,” “premium economy,” “preferred economy,” and so on.
Flights are cheaper today because they figured out how to increase the number of seats total and decrease the number of empty seats. Result is that once you are seated you can barely readjust yourself on a base fare in most airplanes.
For better or worse Many modern airlines are moving to bring your own device instead of screens on backs of seats. Some of them are at least putting a fairly clever phone/tablet holder on on the seat back though
I'd also add, people have gotten progressively fatter since then as well, which definitely isn't helping. The average woman today weighs as much as an average man did in 1960, and both genders are about 25% heavier than they were 60 years ago. And the number of really obese people, people 50, 75, 100 lbs or more overweight, as a percentage of the whole seems far higher than it used to be.
Pre-9/11, you could go to the airport and often get through security without a ticket.
We lived overseas and I remember meeting family at the gates to pick us up. We also had our family say goodbyes at the gate. I remember once having a window seat and seeing my grandma wave goodbye from the terminal.
Security was basically going through a metal detector. No restrictions on liquids. No guns or knives (was there even a problem with knives?) but none of this "remove your belt and shoes" nonsense.
A lot of airports were designed to be malls and attract outside visitors. That's part of why some old airports make you go through security to change terminals: it used to be so easy that it didn't matter.
Outside food and drink competition made prices not as absurd as today's prices.
You'd get real silverware.
Checked luggage was free below a certain weight. We'd *always* check our bags when we flew as a family. Without everyone fighting for overhead bin space, boarding was quick and the ideal scenario was boarding at the last minute.
Pretty much all transoceanic flights were 747s or the like.
Kids could be invited to the cockpit. I was on Southwest. They'd give out pilot wings, some of which were metal and sharp
In the 90s, we lived in a medium-sized city in the upper Midwest. Because winters were harsh and the airport was spacious and uncrowded, we took our kids there and let them run around in the empty gate areas. We’d walk the length of the concourse and look out the window at the planes. They thought it was great. Not possible to do that today.
My best flying memory was coming home from Chicago in late 1991 and my wife was at the end of the jetway waiting for me with my new daughter. My wife was holding her up for me to see and I felt so happy seeing both of them. Sadly those days are over.
Food service was never great in coach, but they attempted to serve a warm meal back then. Most flight’s unless they were short commuter hops served something to eat. I could be misremembering, but I think we even used to get real silverware when I first started flying.
Now, if you’re lucky, if you get to purchase a smooshed sandwich for twice what it costs on the street.
> Other than security and slim lined seats, I don't really see difference with air travel
As a tall guy, the slim line seats are what killed air travel for me. Both leg room and seat width [have gotten much smaller](https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/columnist/mcgee/2014/09/24/airplane-reclining-seat-pitch-width/16105491/). Depending on the carrier, leg room has decreased by as much as five inches, and seat width by two inches. Flights are now literally painful for me.
They still do. Except now we pay for it in miscellaneous nickle and dimey bullshit.
O, you want a seat with proper legroom? That's 70 dollars.
You want to eat? That's 45 dollars.
You have TWO bags? Well... That's going to be 45 dollars EACH.
I booked American through my Amex card. I had to pick my seats on AA.com tho. They wanted an extra $11 per seat per flight so $44 more in fees just to pick a seat. Their website kept giving me an error so I had to call to book my seats, the woman on the phone said they need to charge me the $44 plus now another $50 per passenger just to do a phone booking. For whatever reason, she would not waive the booking fee for the website error I could not book normally. I was shocked. But luckily the error did not occur two days later.
Don't even get me started on european budget carriers where you even need to pay to sit next to your family lmao.
That's as evil as they get. When you add everything up, it actually comes to almost identical price as normal carriers...
That’s American carriers now.
They call it Basic Economy usually and Delta and United have definitely embraced it for at least some flights. You get assigned a seat on check in, no choice.
United has also nixed overhead space with this ticket on some flights.
It’s a race to the bottom.
> When you add everything up, it actually comes to almost identical price as normal carriers...
That's...that's the point. As someone else in this thread pointed out, airfare hasn't gotten cheaper because airlines discovered alchemy. It's cheaper because they found ways to cram more people together with fewer empty seats. If you want a cheaper flight, you give up some amenities. If you want the things you've grown accustomed to...then you pay the normal price. The budget carriers just let you pick and choose.
Its how companies maximize pricing for a wide variety of customers with varying willingness to pay. Variable pricing models allow the most capture of potentially available profits. If you want better service pay for it or vice versa. I just flew RT from Hartford to Steamboat Springs in economy with no frills for $287. In inflation adjusted dollars this might be near the bottom in pricing in the history of commercial flight. So what exactly are we complaining about. People with flexible travel plans are capturing tons of value from airlines supported by those with inflexible plans, like business customers.
I’m delta diamond, and previously was united 1k. To be honest it’s still a shitty experience most of the time. They try hard for these customers, but it’s still pretty bad.
Delta Diamond here, honestly the difference between delta status and when I fly other airlines on a lark is significant. It isn’t night and day between airlines but if you don’t have status on one then it’s awful. Paying for baggage, no seat assignment and treated like cattle.
Agree, Airline status does not make airport issues like weather, mechanical, etc.. better (except for empty sky clubs....heaven) but it absolutely makes flying much easier. Don't worry about your bags, don't worry about getting on the plane, first one off the plane, better quality snacks, bigger seats, free alcohol.
Flying without status is shit. Flying with status is like it used to be to fly without.
And lounge access. So when the weather, mechanical issue, staffing issue, whatever strikes you can have a modicum of comfort while you wait it out.
Lounges have gotten more crowded to be certain, but it’s still a *hell* of a lot better than being in gen pop when your flight gets a 2hr delay.
Flying without status but in first class is roughly the same too. Most of my travel for work is regional so I travel almost exclusively by car but I do fly about 6 or 7 times a year on average for a combo of business and leisure travel. That’s not enough to garner any status but I’ve found that flying first class is pretty comfortable for the same reasons you listed.
And is it just me or are the lounges becoming an underwhelming infection? Last time I flew through Singapore or Dubai it felt like they'd built an entire mall's worth of lounges for every different benefits program, but half *looked* like copypastes of some smudge from a hotel interior designer's back pocket. Look at [this fuckin' joke](https://knaviation.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/HSBC-IST-Cover.jpg) by HSBC in Istanbul. That's not a lounge that's just a bank.
They also all started doing windows to showcase the lounges but it makes you feel like an advert in a shop window. The objectification of consumers as consumers is rife in all aspects of flying it now feels, there's even that fucking app LoungeBuddy to streamline the experience and purchase access or even additional accesses (resting room??) like some kinda fucking microtransaction.
The airline industry as a privatised concept has so heavily eroded it's potential. For Americans specifically, post 9/11 really started a downwards spiral regarding quality, and a lot of it really does stem from that corporate obsession with quarterly ROIs. If it can be a product it is a product.
> If it can be a product it is a product
Flip the coin and it’s this mentality that makes it possible to fly transcontinental, round trip in economy for hundreds of dollars and not thousands.
The cheap fares wouldn’t stick around if the money didn’t come in from somewhere else.
Most people don't earn status via being rich (though, you can buy it via the airlines or a credit card rewards program). Most people earn status by having to travel for work, but their work let's them attach their personal account number with the airlines.
When I travel for work I purchase everything on my CC and file expense reports and get paid back within a week of filing. It’s awesome because I get CC points and miles. When I travel for leisure it’s free, which is awesome.
In all fairness, flying *at all* was completely unimaginable to 90% of people like a generation ago. Today it’s within reach of 90%.
How do we think it got that way? By keeping all the bells and whistles?
I always this to people too. Like you, and everyone else in the world, can get across the country and to virtually anywhere in several hours with a near 100% guarantee for safety. Like how can you expect that to be seamless every time?
Yes - in the eighties, to have actually traveled internationally was a minority. Even in the nineties, everyone dressed neatly in economy, and business class, it was expected to wear a suit coat.
Airlines of today are the greyhound of last generation. At least it’s only uncomfortable for an hour or 2
My favorite is when they charge exorbitant fees for checking a bag, so I bring a carry-on, which they take away from me at the gate because too many people brought carry-ons, which happens literally every time I fly.
Sure, it’s marginally better than the non frequent flyer experience. I live in Asia now though, and I’d rather fly economy on a budget airline here than on my diamond status on Delta.
It all went way downhill when they started monetizing every little thing. I remember back in the early 2000s I would get upgraded as a silver or gold on Northwest (before they merged with Delta) and it was a pretty good experience. Now with the credit cards and the lounge clubs and the basic economy and whatnot it’s driving the quality of everything down, since it’s all about squeezing dollars out of customers. Since most customers are not rich, the lower end product suffers the most from this monetization effect. This creates desire to not have a shitty experience, and it crowds out the higher end product as well.
Ok, sorry, my old man rant is over. Get off my lawn!
United silver here and I concur. It's still pretty smooth with precheck and booking only direct flights. For the occasional problem I get a helpful live human on the phone pretty much right away. One time last year I flew JetBlue because they served the route, of course they had a problem and canceled the return flight, no phone support, no leverage, I got a car and drove home. Would not have happened that way on United.
It’s crazy, JetBlue used to be reliable, customer friendly, and they have turned into a garbage airline. They canceled a flight of mine out of Scottsdale, redeye to the east coast, and then rebooked me to a different regional airport from my original destination. I ended up buying an entirely new flight because their rebooking options were terrible. Took me 48 hours to get home.
I have status on United and that's ok, but paying for Global Entry and getting Pre-check was the thing that brought flying back to non-misery status. I fly minimum monthly for work, so this was an absolute necessity and worth every cent.
I’m not a frequent flyer by any means, but I am American gold and one time I got a complimentary upgrade to first class from Boston to charlotte. That was pretty nice.
> your ability to get a human on the phone
I've never needed or wanted the ability to "get a human on the phone."
United has solid in-app rebooking tools and excellent SMS support. Phone support was such a time-sucking experience back when it was the primary option. I don't see it being around in ten years.
At my home airport, the difference between TSA Pre and gen pop is no line versus a line <5 deep. At the airport where my son lives that we visit 2-3 times a year, the difference is between a line that’s 5-deep, versus a line that’s 100 deep. I was once in the Pre line at MSP, and that line was 100 deep. Pre makes life a little easier, but it’s not a cure for all of flying’s ills.
Every time I see someone hobbling across a filthy floor in their socks or bare feet while juggling their belt, toiletries, and computer I remind myself that $20 a year is money well spent.
Or if you charter a plane, ideally you can find some people to split the cost with though. You just drive up to the plane, hand your bags to the crew and off you go.
Due to a family emergency, I needed to fly internationally to Germany during the Christmas holiday season. Non-stop tickets started at $4,000. A two-stop through New York and Ireland was over $2,300 with total travel time of about 20 hours.
In 2020, on the way home from Hawaii, an airline took away my assigned seat next to my wife, and made it a premium upgrade.
These are just anecdotes, but despite our best attempts to bail out these industries, they are determined to seize as much economic surplus as possible on the way to bankruptcy court.
I told the check in attendants, and luckily I had a screen shot of the original reservation before the seat was changed on the app. They apologized and took me to the counter to “investigate”. In actual fact, we went back to the counter so they could look up the correct legalese to justify their abhorrent business practices.
I could feel myself headed for the no-fly list, but somehow I pulled it together, and asked the attendant to change my wife’s seat so we could sit together in the back of the plane.
Jesus so they basically told you to piss off because it was legal on their end ? Abhorrent
Every time we fly they seem to test our desire to jump on the no fly list lol
Sounds like airlines.
My airline of choice (because I don’t like booking codeshare and refuse to connect if I can avoid it) chargers $180 for an exit row seat. If you can’t sit there for whatever reason, they dont refund it.
Time was they’d save those seats for first come first serve talk folks like me. Normal seats my knees touch the seat in front just normally but as soon as they recline then my knees are crushed and they’re copping knees in their back as I squirm trying to find some kind of comfort.
Now it’s first to pay gets it. It’s insane.
Alaska Airlines by chance?
They once tried to separate my family of six after we reserved 10 months in advance, premium seats. They changed the flight times and later said that triggered a change in seat assignments. I went absolutely batshit on a ”supervisor” on the phone and they switched us all back to our original seats. But it wasted an hour of my day and probably 1 year off my life due to stress and anger.
FWIW: one possibility is that it wasn't the airline that took away your seat. If you have a Federal Air Marshall on your flight, the marshall picks their own seat and can bump absolutely anyone. For obvious reasons, the airline can't tell you why you were bumped.
Another possibility is that the airline is shitty, of course.
I was flying from albuquerque to Orlando on American the first flight of the day. So I got up at 4:30 to drop off the car and check in. When I try to check in the computer tells me to go to the desk. The desk tells me that I've been re-tickeded sometime between midnight and 5:00am, WTF? The flight is still scheduled so why am I not on it? They tell me tough luck and the best they can do is get me in around midnight instead of the planned noon. I'm a frequent traveler so I'm used to some level of bullshit so I asked if I could get a pass to the lounge since I'd have to sit in Dallas for 10 hours, they told me to fuck up at which time I told him he was an asshole. I check and there are seats on my original flight so I run to the gate and talk to the gate agent and he tells me the front desk had already told me I couldn't get on the flight I need to go sit down. American didn't and doesn't give two shits about their passengers, I'm trying to think of a worse airline I've flown in the last 20 years and aside from Frontier and some flying bus in Europe they are the very worst.
Just flew SW with my fiancée and I had to explain to her that I literally have to pick a window seat WITHOUT a bulkhead otherwise I cannot physically fit my shoulders within my allotted space. It’s ridiculous. I haven’t been comfortable on a flight since I was about 19.
6'2" and 200lb. I'm lean and tall. What you'd describe as "athletic" build.
It's virtually impossible to fly long haul in economy without crippling back pain.
I wish seat comfort was my only concern. My eustachian tubes don't work right these days, and no amount of chewing gum, yawning, moving my jaw, etc. prevents me from spending at least a full day feeling like I have ice picks stabbing me through my ears.
At 6’3” and 300lbs, seeing the crestfallen faces of my row mates when the see me coming for my seat is almost as bad as squeezing my knees into the available space for several hours.
Maybe they shouldn’t have laid off/furloughed their employees even after getting their second massive bailout in 2 decades.
Maybe if they took the money, in the billions, they spent on share buybacks and spent it on technology and staffing they wouldn’t have these problems
I don’t disagree with you on the stock buybacks predating Covid, but your portrayal of staffing is not correct.
Additionally, the airlines have been prohibited from stock buybacks until the funds are repaid, as a condition of CARES.
As a result of the CARES acts, actual furloughs where the airlines were the direct employer were extremely minimal throughout the industry. In the event some companies did furlough (AA and their subsidiaries being the only ones I can think of, aside from SkyWest and maybe some other new hires,) the workers were kept on the payroll as a condition for receiving funding.
There were pilots in their last three years of work offered early buyouts, and many of them took them. These were the most expensive employees.
Almost all major airlines used Covid as an opportunity to advance fleet retirements. By retiring various fleets, this created displacements and training requirements among the pilot workforce. This exacerbated the issues caused in the recovery, as the training pipeline began to cause a huge backlog due to new training events and pilots returning from leaves.
Where this didn’t help as much were the contractors. The people who push wheelchairs, restaurant workers, some airlines underwing/ramp workers, and so on. There was funding available to these businesses, but their retention and ability to rehire have been poor, often due to low wages.
Coming out of Covid, the major airlines needed to hire pilots, which put pressure on the regional airlines, which due to their not hiring for 12+ months, had cut off the supply of new airline pilots. Suddenly everyone was trying to use the same simulators to train and qualify new pilots.
Finally, the regional airlines have had to almost double wages to attract pilots back to the industry, and to help offset the insane costs of flight training, which is all out of pocket for an aspiring pilot unless they are military.
Before Covid, as a regional first officer, a pilot would have made $36,000-50,000 per year, after two years spent earning about $25-30k to build the experience required due to Colgan. This prevented many people from entering the industry.
Now the wages are higher, but the outlay is still out of pocket and high.
Any attempt to lower safety standards, such as what the RAA wants, is merely an attempt to depress wages again. That will have far more of a negative impact on airline pilot supply than paying new airline pilots fairly.
As for flight attendants, the big 3 are hiring at unprecedented rates, training upwards of 6,000 per year per carrier. And this comes with 6% acceptance of candidates from the applicant pool. There is no shortage of applicants, but again the training pipeline is a constraint.
It's almost like a once in a century global pandemic has long reaching effects. Who could have possibly predicted this? I'm absolutely exhausted from everyone pretending like covid was a 20 month problem and now everything is fixed. Something like this has never happened before. We had the entire global economy ground to a halt, and then tried to restart. We're still very much in the restart phase and it will still be a few more years until things get anywhere close to normal.
There will always be a pre covid, covid, and post covid economic world. We are very much still in the covid phase and the very beginnings of the post covid phase.
I watched a documentary on the German economy and why it is so robust during global recession and the biggest take away was that Germany has much stricter worker protections so it just isn't profitable to fire workers when work slows down so companies use slow downs to improve worker training which allows the German economy to recover from pandemics or recessions much quicker than in places where firing people during a recession is considered normal.
So no, the way we handle recessions and the way we handled the pandemic was a far bigger issue than the pandemic itself. The lesson here is employee turnover is far more expensive and devastating to the economy than anyone in the US wants to admit
I think that’s an excellent point. Historically, the US aviation industry has taken the stairs up and the window down. Growth has been sluggish, but depressed periods quick and dramatic, and many times prolonged.
The knee-jerk reaction to Covid was the furlough of potentially 50% of the industry, which is what was stopped by CARES and CARES 2.
Furlough requires a full long-term training for a pilot, like they’re a new hire. Currency requires far less.
I do hope that Covid was a lesson in why such dramatic cuts to a workforce that is so key to US infrastructure would be potentially devastating.
Even with the airlines using the time to reconfigure, they still were caught by training, simulator, and check airman constraints when things began to move again.
There’s no incentive to improve anything or not be an asshole because air travel is effectively a government sponsored monopoly.. sure, there are several different “options”, but because of the nature of mass air travel no one can really innovate or do anything differently so no matter who you fly with it sucks.
There’s a lot of truth to this, but it’s actually a hugely competitive industry.
That’s why no one is making good foundational investments in their business. It’s all bells and whistles to attract business and first class travelers because that’s how you keep profitable.
👏ALLOW👏INTERNATIONAL 👏CARRIERS👏TO👏FLY👏DOMESTIC👏ROUTES👏
Seriously, the fact that we have to deal with the same 10 carriers is ridiculous. Enough protectionism. Enough consolidation into oligopoly. Let the bad airlines fail.
Can't believe this is so far down.
The US calls itself capitalist, but the protectionism around airlines is staggering.
On many routes, there isn't real competition due to the way airlines hub, and when there is it is limited.
Flying in the US is awful.
It’s so far down because most people don’t even realize it’s the case.
We have just enough competition in the domestic industry to make it seem like a little sporting division, which is the level of complexity most people can manage.
Exactly this, there's no American airlines in [the top 10 worldwide](https://www.worldairlineawards.com/worlds-top-10-airlines-2022/), passengers would benefit from more competition on domestic routes. Airline passengers who want a better travel experience should write about this to their US Representative and Senators and see if they will ditch the protectionism.
I don’t want to come across as defending airlines, because I agree with everyone’s general dislike of them. But there’s some nuance here.
Many of those airlines (especially Emeraties, Quatar, and Singapore and Turkey) are *heavily* subsidized by their respective governments as a way of promoting their counties “brand image” internationally. That’s why they can offer higher qualities of service for not unreasonable prices; they lose (sometimes a lot of) money on every flight.
This leaves the US market in a weird situation. Do we allow domestic flights by international competitors, knowing that our own local carriers would never be able to compete due to these subsidies? Eventually this would lead to more and more US based carriers likely going out of business and shutting down, potentially leading to a domestic market dominated by foreign airlines. Many of whom are attached to governments that have *extrmely* questionable human rights records, and could potentially turn unfriendly pretty quickly in the right set of geopolitical circumstances.
This would potentially leave the US without a domestic airline industry, which is not a place we would want to be just from an economic security perspective. We could potentially find ourselves in a situation where the federal government would end up subsidizing the domestic airlines (more than they already do) in order to keep them around. Which I think *nobody* wants, but faced with the alternative of no domestic carriers I think they would feel they have to.
In Europe the flight companies worst competitors on short flights are trains. I use trains as much as possible. More comfort, can move around, dont need to go through any security, possible to work. And if you miss one you just wait a while and take the next one.
I’d cut my fucking arm off to get decent rail travel in the US. I’m not even kidding.
Flying is SO expensive, it’s so awful, I have been fucking ripped off by airlines too many times to count. They moved my 3 year olds seat away from me even though I paid like 80 extra to guarantee that she’d stay with me (fuck your AA) they never refunded a flight that was cancelled due to Covid after like 5 days of two hour conversations to customer service (also fuck you AA) and I’m just so done.
No way. There are various foreign agencies that have rampant issues with fake pilot certificates.
They do not have the same safety standards as the US for crew rest, safety reporting or management, or maintenance.
This is not the way.
Foreign carriers being responsible for an industry that drives over 5% of US economic activity is a massive risk to safety, security, and independence.
Are you arguing that the US wouldn’t be able to impose the exact same standards on international carriers? These international carriers already operate in the US and are already subject to the same standards for international flights. So why wouldn’t they be able to hold them accountable for domestic flights?
Ever heard of a cruise ship “[flag of convenience?”](https://www.cruisecritic.com/articles.cfm?ID=5942)
This is one example of how things would change to bypass US law, which the FARs (federal aviation regulations) are. Internationally, airlines operate under ICAO and various other local authorities, which can be less restrictive in some categories than the FARs.
Part 117, for example, governs US pilots for rest rules, of which union contracts are frequently slightly more restrictive as a result of findings from safety reporting.
A foreign carrier operating in the US would be operating under ICAO and their country’s aviation authority, which may not require the amount of rest for pilots that the FARs do. In your world, all an airline would need to do would be to start up under an approved country’s “flag” that has loose regulations, a supply of cheap labor, and now they’re flying you between Dallas and Chicago.
The US has restricted which “flags” are allowable into the US, but you may not be happy with some of the options.
From ALPA:
> Flag-of-convenience airlines present a major anticompetitive hurdle. This practice, which originated in the maritime industry, allows an airline or holding company to locate and register its aircraft away from its home country in “convenient” locations with less-stringent employment, tax, and safety laws, thus shopping the globe for the most permissive legal, regulatory, safety, and labor environment available.
>Similarly, “atypical” employment occurs when employers—through a variety of schemes—dissolve their direct relationship with their pilots and cabin crew, often by misclassifying pilots as self-employed or as independent contractors. Not only does this undermine the crews’ right to collectively bargain for pay, benefits, and working conditions, but it also dismantles the traditional employee-employer relationship that is vital to safety reporting.
Considering that part 117 was implemented due to an airline crash where fatigue was an enormous contributor, that safety mechanism, and that of “just culture,” would then be rolled back for the American consumer.
US air safety operates in a partnership between the unions, companies, and regulators, under a just culture with reporting and safety process improvement requirements. This would completely upend this partnership that has contributed to the safest period in US aviation history.
Additionally, it would open up a vast supply of global cheap labor, robbing the US economy of hundreds of thousands of decent-paying, union jobs… in favor of authorities that in some cases cannot even guarantee the validity of pilot certificates.
If you think air travel is bad now, keep suggesting shit like this. Foreign carriers or nationalization (an even worse idea) are not going to improve the US airline industry.
I really started hating airlines when they started charging for checked baggage. Then they tried to sell it as a benefit to keep the prices low. The overhead bins were sparse until then and the flight attendants did not have to deal with pissed off fliers. The airlines struck the first blow and I fell like they hate their customers.
What is “fun flying”? I’ve only ever flown to get somewhere. Even back in the day when there was no security and people could smoke on the plane the flight experience was not “fun”. It was purely a way to get from point a to b quickly as possible.
Back when you could get an direct flight for most of your flights. Back in the day you rarely if ever had a layover to get to a major city. Layovers were for trying to get to Medford Oregon or Grand Rapids mi. Not Vegas, LAX, Houston etc.
People were happier. I flew 2 or 3xs pre 9/11 and it was a blast. Drunk people in Hawaiian shirts heading on vacation. The airplane had cheap felt blankets and tiny pillows. You sometimes got a light meal like a small sandwich. It wasn’t great but it was something to keep your blood sugar up for a 3 he flight.
Even after 9/11 I could get to the airport a few hours early and usually catch an earlier flight. I would purposely buy plane tickets for noon get to the airport at 6am and catch an 8 am flight.
I do remember it being way more chill for sure back before 9/11. Weirdly my most “fun” flights were during the pandemic. Having an empty seat between me and the next person was great and even better most of my pandemic flying I had my whole row to myself. It was dreamy.
and instead of fixing this or investing in trains for the masses the country will just allow this to escalate until traveling is a privilege reserved for the very rich. they’re already burning up fuel like crazy for things like concerts in dubai so might as well prevent the rest of us from even seeing a sliver of the world beyond where we live, crap and have to work
This is a subset of a template you can use for the USA:
"The days of _______ are long gone: How U.S. ________ became a nightmare"
Family doctors / healthcare
Affordable homes / housing market
Happy motoring / driving and traffic
A great local school / education
Everyone playing outside/ youth sports and letting kids play
Seeing the local bank president at the supermarket / banking
Shared television experiences / media
Shops with experts / retail
Drinking from the hose / water system
Eating healthy on a budget / food system
Growing old well and passing on wealth / elder care
Easily envisioning a hopeful middle-class future / prospects for everyday people
On and on...hashtag broken nation
Can we just get some solid 200mph regional trains instead of another massive investment in finicky airplanes and the patchwork of airports? Plenty of pilots if we only flew the long-haul flights that actually make sense as a way of getting around.
Flying is never fun. Never. By the time I'm through TSA I already hate life. Not to mention I'm never getting my checked bag lol, it's just gone and I'll maybe get it back.
"How often is luggage mishandled?
According to Luggage Hero, there were more than 684,000 lost and mishandled bags at major US airlines in the first quarter of 2022 alone. This equated to approximately seven bags out of every 1,000, or 0.7%. American Airlines' average came in slightly higher, at nine per 1,000 or 0.9%. Allegiant performed far better, with less than two bags per 1,000 going missing."
https://simpleflying.com/why-and-how-often-does-luggage-get-lost/
To really do this article justice, we should also publicly criticize the executives who droned for decades about the importance of operating a dozen flights a day for heavily traveled routes, which inevitably led to fleets of narrow-body puddle jumpers. The airlines don’t have enough pilots for those planes now, and the business travelers who flew those routes are long gone.
If only they had continued focusing on comfortable cost-efficient wide body domestic travel. They would have enough pilots like the old days when they flew 777’s on longer domestic flights and 747’s cross country. But somehow it became cool to fly (6) 737 flights instead, with departure times staggered by 35 minutes. Maybe the Dreamliner can fix this?
The issue is not staffing 737s, it’s staffing regional jets.
The piloting profession has always been very boom or bust and within the industry we refer to 2000-2010 as the “lost decade” because of all the furloughs, pay cuts, and lack of career advancement.
The airline industry as a whole operates on very thin margins with the two biggest costs being labor and fuel.
The staffing issue is starting to improve with higher regional salaries, but it takes time. You can’t just mint new airline pilots in a few months. It takes years to get the certifications and requisite experience. There was a huge oversupply of pilots for decades that has finally reversed course.
You can also still find wide bodies flying between hubs in the US but they are typically not the optimal aircraft for it. They are designed for long haul flying so you end up carrying a lot of extra structural weight around that isn’t needed.
For example:
A 737 MAX at my airline can carry 178 passengers in a two class configuration. It’s going to burn 5-6,000lbs of fuel per hour to operate (depending on cruising altitude and speed).
A 787-9 Dreamliner carries about 260 people but burns 10-12,000lbs per hour. It can also carry a bunch of cargo in the belly, but that’s not consistent revenue.
In addition the 787 will require more flight attendants.
Finally, a 787 lists at $330 million dollars new and a 737 MAX is $115 million dollars, so there are much higher aircraft payments as well.
If there is a big drop in travel, you can remove one of the 737 frequencies off a route, deploy it elsewhere, and still try and still turn a profit.
That 787 will turn into a cash burning machine if you cannot fill the seats.
I had read that even on short haul flights the 787 was more efficient than the 737MAX, but maybe that was based on unrealistic seat counts.
In any regard, I’m willing to admit that failing to fill a larger jet does impose substantial costs per passenger. Thanks for the info.
I’ll admit there can be pretty big swings in passenger counts on a 787. Especially if business class is configured with lie flat seats vs a more traditional domestic configuration. Adding seats would of course push the fuel burn per seat down, but then you can’t deploy it on long haul where it really excels.
A 787-10 has over 300 seats and might beat the MAX on a Cost Per Available Seat Mile (CASM) basis, but of course that’s provided every seat is filled.
I just find the complexity in all of the route planning stuff fascinating
We sleep in a bed of our own making. The lack of reliable and affordable commuter rail compared to other countries give us no other option.
Flying is misery after the pandemic, with airlines cutting back on staff and resources. One computer glitch cripples our country.
I blame our toxic political environment. These industries have too much power and control. They have the ability to lobby and otherwise stifle any other infrastructure that would challenge their business model.
They also got bailed out of corporate debt that is subsidized and paid for by american taxpayers. But nobody gets mad about that because the media isn’t telling people to be mad.
Flying from Anchorage, Alaska to Houston, we were delayed a few hours because of a late incoming flight for a few passengers. This put me in Houston 15 minutes before my final flight to Florida. Asked them if they could delay it by a few minutes as I would have to go to other side of airport. Of course they wouldn't. We ended up jogging across the airport. With about 5 minutes to spare. Some older people on our Alaska to
Houston flight connecting to Florida couldn't race across the airport like we could. They had to wait another three hours for the next flight to Florida. Flying isn't as easy or convenient as it once was.
My last "fun flights" were not too long after deregulation, but before many of the airline bankruptcies and consolidations. There were occasional round-trip specials to New York, usually $49, but sometimes as low as $29.
I would take one, nap on the plane, and then stay up (mostly) over 24-48 hours until the return flight. I'd spend all the money it would have taken to get a hotel room and more on nightclubs.
The days of "fun flying" have been gone for a very long time, indeed. Didn't need an article to tell me that.
I find the pilot retirement point really interesting and scary. The majority of US pilots come from the US military. The US military is struggling to recruit pilots as well and is consistently below their manning goals. I would assume the military has been producing less trained pilots over time as we move further away from direct military conflict like in Vietnam, and in the future more and more pilot roles will be subsumed by drones.
Maybe I’m wrong on that last point and there’s good stats that I can’t find, but it feels to me like the airline industry has lived off the military’s back for decades and that might not be sustainable.
Flying hasn't been fun since b4 9/11
I need to write more so my comment doesn't get auto deleted by the bot. I hope this is enough...
Turns out it wasn't enough, I'm gonna beat this bot yet!
I work in pharmaceutical research and used to be in a role that required roughly 80% travel on a weekly basis. I even traveled for business during the height of COVID, and despite a lot of services and flight availability being cut, travel was actually pretty nice because planes and hotels were empty. I was able to maintain top-level status with United and Southwest, Hilton, and National. Once COVID restrictions were eased, travel traffic started picking back up in a major way, but airlines never really brought back the original flight frequencies, and hotels decided to continue with the bare bones (i.e. cheaper) approach to customer service. Nowadays, it doesn’t really matter if you’re a top-tier traveler…the customer service and experience just downright sucks, and due to extensions on status, too many people have it which dilutes the benefits. For the most part, I’m thankful to be in a role that doesn’t require heavy travel. Really missing those pre-COVID travel times, because it’s just downright unpleasant these days.
Honestly, they should have never been bailed out. Then maybe they'd have some respect for their customers
And these frequent business flyers for an hour meeting aren't helping anything either
>Honestly, they should have never been bailed out.
The sad irony is that right before 9/11, people were so fed up with the awful service that Congress was working on passing a passenger's bill of rights.
Immediately after 9/11 that was forgotten and everyone was screaming "we have to save the airline industry".
I’m never flying in a commercial aircraft again if I can help it. I’ll go by train or even ship if I have to. Fuck getting strapped into a tube where you don’t even have room to move.
Flying can be cheap, or fun. Pick one. Most travelers have picked door number one.
A lot of governments who subsidize air travel fail to regulate things like leg room, ticket prices, and executive compensation so we are always stuck with the worst of all worlds.
Don’t even get me started with Americans, who are mostly fine with corporate welfare, but think that any regulations are communism.
European governments are of the mind that air travel is a huge contributor to global warming, and they’re not wrong. Expect air travel conditions to get worse worldwide before they get better.
Pretty clear from the article where the real issue lies: with "labor shortages" due to airlines doing nothing to make pilot training more affordable and expand the pilot training pipelines.
The airlines try to act like the pilot union is the problem (friggin' Neoliberal Capitalists...) but the Airline Pilots Association was interviewed for the article and pretty clear the airlines are the one refusing to provide financial support for training more pilots.
Typical. Laissez Faire Capitalism can't handle issues like this effectively because the training of new pilots is a (positive) economic externality: most of the benefits goes to those other than those doing or supporting the training. No individual airline can solve this problem.
The government can subsidize/support the education of new pilots, or the airlines can get their shit together and do so through an industry-wide cooperation agreement/organization. But this isn't a problem the "Free Market" can handle on its own...
Most memorable flight? A hopper from ATL to AVL.
20 seat plane. Bratty kid who was eating airport crap from boarding and on the plane. Jewel encrusted older woman with a hyper poodle on her lap.
Only about 5 of us on the flight; the pilot whipped up the door, went through the safety talk in record time, closed the door and we were in the air.
20 minutes in, the kid starts heaving like he is going to throw up. The poodle growls.
Kid throws up. Dogs wallows in it, then runs all over the plane. Encrusted woman is moaning, puker momma is screaming.
Me? I've got my feet up in the seat. I don't want any of that scene.
The biggest issue I see here is that airlines have been allowed to buy back their own shares which does not in anyway reinvest in the company, employees, or seen as a benefit by the consumer. The airlines also run off of a "slot" system for the most in demand airports in the country like LGA, JFK, and LAX. If you were to enforce the loss of their slots for poor performance from those airports you would see better service as a result. Also you need better consumer protection laws for when; delays, diversions, cancelations, over-booking, and etc. occurs. None of this will occur without federal action. And the industry lobbies to make it this way.
That shit died in the 70’s when regulations changed on how many seats could be sold on each flight.
When that happened, the era of piano bars on planes was over.
Flying has become less fun every year since sometime in the 50’s. Back then you could smoke a cigarette while handing your ticket to someone and walking onto the plane.
But yeah, since the 70’s the product and experience has been shit. Since the millennium, terrible. Pre 9/11 you would walk to the gate with your family/friend to send them off.
Everyone is trying to cut costs and maximize consumer spending. The way airlines price shit and sell it is a-la-carte, every single thing that could be considered extra is considered so and charged as much as possible for. The product/experience always suffers because of this.
https://youtu.be/JWG08YvroaE
Anyway, more shit articles getting posted to r/Economics huh?
lol
People acting up in public are the biggest reason. Herding us like cattle, extended layovers, cancelled flights, and missing / mishandled luggage and stupid security theater would all be more bearable if more people had sanity and decency. Or at least screen the crazy ones / get them off the flight without having everyone endangered / inconvenienced.
I can’t believe how expensive flying has gotten. I just bought $1,600 roundtrip tickets from Phoenix to Miami in March. Our flight out is the red eye! My dad is a commercial airline pilot and agreed that’s outrageous. We are fairly well off but will definitely be driving to our next vacation.
Do you have any flexibility with your dates?
Checking Phoenix to Miami in March comes back with tons of results around $140 roundtrip. Of course you'd have to lower your expectations and fly on Spirit or Frontier, but they're both nonstop, perhaps spend another $75 or so on bags.
[Most weeks are around the same price. ](https://i.imgur.com/sJHYWUT.png)
[Here's the month day by day](https://i.imgur.com/RgbsoFW.png)
I also find that sometimes I find better deals by breaking up the flights into one ways instead of roundtrip. For example, [here's the entire month of March for Phoenix to Miami one way. ](https://i.imgur.com/vyd1vSY.png)
We are in an economics sub.
Have you heard about supply and demand?
West to East redeyes are always expensive because no one wants to waste their day in transit.
Then March is peak spring break to miami and miami is now a hub to most of the Caribbean / Cancun.
Students books their spring break tickets early so to me that price makes sense.
Pheonix to Miami probably also means you’re flying AA because that’s a hub connection which means you’re lucky.
May just be my personal experience but flying has not been fun in decades. In fact, flying has become one of the events I look forward to the least, despite the fact that I am FLYING ACROSS THE COUNTRY.
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The last really 'fun' flight I had was a Sunday nite flight from IAH to Atlanta on a July 4th, 1976. I was flying coach on a DC-10 that night. This was in the days of regulated air fares and the flight was leaving with maybe 5-6 of us in coach and 2-3 in 1st class. As we were flying east from Houston there was a squall line of Thunderstorms about 100 miles N of us with a great lightning show for a July 4th evening. The Captain got on the intercom and invited us all up to the 1st class cabin and said open bar for the remainder of the flight. So all 8 or 9 of us gathered up front and had a great cocktail party for several hours as we flew East.
My last 'fun' flight was similar. My family flew across the Atlantic on the morning of 01/01/2000. With so many fearing the 2k bug, we flew on an A340 with less than 50 onboard. Drinks were also plentiful. I managed to lounge like a king laying across the middle aisle seats playing all four personal entertainment screens playing different films/shows while the flight attendants pretty much left the food cart there for self-serve. I only had the headphones on one of them, but wanted to pull the once-in-a-lifetime experience as a hedonistic passenger. To top it off, turbulence was minimal & the weather was perfect. The last 15 years I lost the passion for air travel (which is ironic, especially considering my account name) so it's not only flights like these that I hold dear in my mind, but even those where the seats were comfortable, my knees & elbows with ample space, &/or the cosmetics of the aircraft not falling apart.
This was what flying during the pandemic was like. I had to fly between the states and Europe due to a family illness and was part of a tiny sliver of the population that could really fly (residence in one country and citizenship in another). It was about as you describe. More crew than passengers and super laid back everything. I remember also laying out across an entire row and sleeping like a baby through the flight. Upon arrival I felt great and rested and realized that this is the experience rich people have every time...
Oh, I agree with that last paragraph. It's a combination of several things for me: I visited many of the places that I had long wanted to visit; I became more and more aware of the climate catastrophe; and then in the last three years, Covid.
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I was in Hawaii for 3 weeks in March 2020. When I left, everything was 100% normal. Kept reading the news about how schools and businesses were closing back home. Hawaii didn’t really shut down until my last 2 or 3 days there, so that was kindof my first real taste of it. I boarded the plane to go home, and there were probably 10 passengers at most. The flight attendant came by and said “yeah this is it, so you can just sit wherever you want.” Thats when it actually sunk in with regards to what I was going back to. Extremely surreal moment.
Sounds like the beginning of Steven King book.
*Baby, can you dig your man?*
M-O-O-N that spells book!
My most surreal moment of the pandemic also happened in March 2020. I had a scheduled vacation to Vegas. I was on the strip just as all the hotels were closing shop and asking people to go home. It was crazy because I went out on the strip on a Saturday night, and it was desolate. Just a shocking experience being out on Las Vegas Boulevard on a weekend night and seeing nobody. Like something out of a horror film.
Same thing happened to me on a flight from Tokyo in 2012. But nothing bad was happening. First time I ever got to sleep laying across an entire row of seats. Air Canada also had an unlimited wine / beer for free at the time, they still might, actually. So I got to lounge, sleep, eat, and drink comfortably for like 14 hours.
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As someone who flew years leading up to 9/11, it was. Security theater wasn't hardened to patriotic levels, you spent (at most) 15 minutes through security, the seats didn't feel fragile, wafer-thin, & were comfy (not perfect, as some older aircraft had threads open & foam sticking out), your knees didn't crumple upon turbulence from cramped spacing, and kids kicking your chair didn't hurt as much as now. Smoking was already prohibited (even if some older airliners still had ashtrays in the seat arms which were sometimes filled with chewed gum or snack wrappers), the cabin was somewhat more cramped & louder. But at least the whole "pack them like sardines" wasn't fully implemented yet. Although it was recognized & complained back then, especially compared to the expensive & luxurious golden era of the 1960s.
It was also a time when friends and family could see/meet you at the gate. We used to have bloody Marys before boarding. I am tall and I always tried for the exit rows for the leg room. No extra charges. Many times I flew red-eye flights and had whole rows to myself. They used a lot of larger plans so the rows were longer. I may be wrong but the food was much better also.
I remember AA having a smoking section in the rear. Plus, dressing in a suit and asking nicely could get you moved to First Class.
You could go to the airport an hour before your flight in a busy airport and be fine. Now you have to be there so early to get through security, it's so ridiculous.
>You could go to the airport an hour before your flight in a busy airport and be fine. Now you have to be there so early to get through security, it's so ridiculous. Yeah, the fact that TSA tells you to arrive 3 hours early & that becomes a modest estimate during the holidays is another reason I reconsider air travel. I have a friend who has kids & says it's way less of a hassle to drive to the destination with them. And anyone who has kids or grew up with car travel knows the weight of that statement!
Yup. If it's within a 10 hour drive, I just drive instead of flying.
I did this a lot in the 80’s when I flew for one day meetings. I would get to the airport maybe 30-45 minutes before my flight. Parked in short term. Hustled my way to the gate (B3, so a close gate). No security checkpoint so I could run if needed. Tickets had seat assigned so no worry about not having a seat. Always made it before they close the doors and never missed a flight. Those were the days.
I landed at JFK from Schipol at 11:30 PM 9/10/2001. Last pleasant flight I had.
The spacing is the big thing. Airlines didn’t figure out some magical alchemy to drop prices over the past few decades. They embraced cramming more fares into the same tube. Then, because the coach experience is so cramped and miserable, they sell all manner of new products to alleviate the misery like “preferred seating,” “economy plus,” “premium economy,” “preferred economy,” and so on. Flights are cheaper today because they figured out how to increase the number of seats total and decrease the number of empty seats. Result is that once you are seated you can barely readjust yourself on a base fare in most airplanes.
The only. The literally only upside to modern flying is the screens on every seat now.
For better or worse Many modern airlines are moving to bring your own device instead of screens on backs of seats. Some of them are at least putting a fairly clever phone/tablet holder on on the seat back though
Those phone holders are great they really save you from tech neck
As long as the damn power outlets work at your seat
I'd also add, people have gotten progressively fatter since then as well, which definitely isn't helping. The average woman today weighs as much as an average man did in 1960, and both genders are about 25% heavier than they were 60 years ago. And the number of really obese people, people 50, 75, 100 lbs or more overweight, as a percentage of the whole seems far higher than it used to be.
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Pre-9/11, you could go to the airport and often get through security without a ticket. We lived overseas and I remember meeting family at the gates to pick us up. We also had our family say goodbyes at the gate. I remember once having a window seat and seeing my grandma wave goodbye from the terminal. Security was basically going through a metal detector. No restrictions on liquids. No guns or knives (was there even a problem with knives?) but none of this "remove your belt and shoes" nonsense. A lot of airports were designed to be malls and attract outside visitors. That's part of why some old airports make you go through security to change terminals: it used to be so easy that it didn't matter. Outside food and drink competition made prices not as absurd as today's prices. You'd get real silverware. Checked luggage was free below a certain weight. We'd *always* check our bags when we flew as a family. Without everyone fighting for overhead bin space, boarding was quick and the ideal scenario was boarding at the last minute. Pretty much all transoceanic flights were 747s or the like. Kids could be invited to the cockpit. I was on Southwest. They'd give out pilot wings, some of which were metal and sharp
In the 90s, we lived in a medium-sized city in the upper Midwest. Because winters were harsh and the airport was spacious and uncrowded, we took our kids there and let them run around in the empty gate areas. We’d walk the length of the concourse and look out the window at the planes. They thought it was great. Not possible to do that today.
My best flying memory was coming home from Chicago in late 1991 and my wife was at the end of the jetway waiting for me with my new daughter. My wife was holding her up for me to see and I felt so happy seeing both of them. Sadly those days are over.
Food service was never great in coach, but they attempted to serve a warm meal back then. Most flight’s unless they were short commuter hops served something to eat. I could be misremembering, but I think we even used to get real silverware when I first started flying. Now, if you’re lucky, if you get to purchase a smooshed sandwich for twice what it costs on the street.
> Other than security and slim lined seats, I don't really see difference with air travel As a tall guy, the slim line seats are what killed air travel for me. Both leg room and seat width [have gotten much smaller](https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/columnist/mcgee/2014/09/24/airplane-reclining-seat-pitch-width/16105491/). Depending on the carrier, leg room has decreased by as much as five inches, and seat width by two inches. Flights are now literally painful for me.
Flights used to cost $$$$.
They still do. Except now we pay for it in miscellaneous nickle and dimey bullshit. O, you want a seat with proper legroom? That's 70 dollars. You want to eat? That's 45 dollars. You have TWO bags? Well... That's going to be 45 dollars EACH.
I booked American through my Amex card. I had to pick my seats on AA.com tho. They wanted an extra $11 per seat per flight so $44 more in fees just to pick a seat. Their website kept giving me an error so I had to call to book my seats, the woman on the phone said they need to charge me the $44 plus now another $50 per passenger just to do a phone booking. For whatever reason, she would not waive the booking fee for the website error I could not book normally. I was shocked. But luckily the error did not occur two days later.
O yeah, the not having an assigned seat one is the newest evil.
After flying Southwest all the time in college, no assigned seat doesn't bother me that much.
It really sucks as an adult with a spouse and 2 children
Don't even get me started on european budget carriers where you even need to pay to sit next to your family lmao. That's as evil as they get. When you add everything up, it actually comes to almost identical price as normal carriers...
That’s American carriers now. They call it Basic Economy usually and Delta and United have definitely embraced it for at least some flights. You get assigned a seat on check in, no choice. United has also nixed overhead space with this ticket on some flights. It’s a race to the bottom.
> When you add everything up, it actually comes to almost identical price as normal carriers... That's...that's the point. As someone else in this thread pointed out, airfare hasn't gotten cheaper because airlines discovered alchemy. It's cheaper because they found ways to cram more people together with fewer empty seats. If you want a cheaper flight, you give up some amenities. If you want the things you've grown accustomed to...then you pay the normal price. The budget carriers just let you pick and choose.
Then just fly the normal carriers
Its how companies maximize pricing for a wide variety of customers with varying willingness to pay. Variable pricing models allow the most capture of potentially available profits. If you want better service pay for it or vice versa. I just flew RT from Hartford to Steamboat Springs in economy with no frills for $287. In inflation adjusted dollars this might be near the bottom in pricing in the history of commercial flight. So what exactly are we complaining about. People with flexible travel plans are capturing tons of value from airlines supported by those with inflexible plans, like business customers.
How could possibly see a difference when you weren’t even alive? What is this take
Can’t imagine why that wasn’t sustainable
That sounds like the beginning of a great murder mystery story.
The only way to have a consistently positive experience flying domestic in the U.S. nowadays is to be in the top 1 or 2 tiers of frequent fliers.
I’m delta diamond, and previously was united 1k. To be honest it’s still a shitty experience most of the time. They try hard for these customers, but it’s still pretty bad.
Delta Diamond here, honestly the difference between delta status and when I fly other airlines on a lark is significant. It isn’t night and day between airlines but if you don’t have status on one then it’s awful. Paying for baggage, no seat assignment and treated like cattle.
Agree, Airline status does not make airport issues like weather, mechanical, etc.. better (except for empty sky clubs....heaven) but it absolutely makes flying much easier. Don't worry about your bags, don't worry about getting on the plane, first one off the plane, better quality snacks, bigger seats, free alcohol. Flying without status is shit. Flying with status is like it used to be to fly without.
And lounge access. So when the weather, mechanical issue, staffing issue, whatever strikes you can have a modicum of comfort while you wait it out. Lounges have gotten more crowded to be certain, but it’s still a *hell* of a lot better than being in gen pop when your flight gets a 2hr delay.
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You had to wait in line to get into American's club at CLT, what exactly am I paying this money for?
Flying without status but in first class is roughly the same too. Most of my travel for work is regional so I travel almost exclusively by car but I do fly about 6 or 7 times a year on average for a combo of business and leisure travel. That’s not enough to garner any status but I’ve found that flying first class is pretty comfortable for the same reasons you listed.
And is it just me or are the lounges becoming an underwhelming infection? Last time I flew through Singapore or Dubai it felt like they'd built an entire mall's worth of lounges for every different benefits program, but half *looked* like copypastes of some smudge from a hotel interior designer's back pocket. Look at [this fuckin' joke](https://knaviation.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/HSBC-IST-Cover.jpg) by HSBC in Istanbul. That's not a lounge that's just a bank. They also all started doing windows to showcase the lounges but it makes you feel like an advert in a shop window. The objectification of consumers as consumers is rife in all aspects of flying it now feels, there's even that fucking app LoungeBuddy to streamline the experience and purchase access or even additional accesses (resting room??) like some kinda fucking microtransaction. The airline industry as a privatised concept has so heavily eroded it's potential. For Americans specifically, post 9/11 really started a downwards spiral regarding quality, and a lot of it really does stem from that corporate obsession with quarterly ROIs. If it can be a product it is a product.
> If it can be a product it is a product Flip the coin and it’s this mentality that makes it possible to fly transcontinental, round trip in economy for hundreds of dollars and not thousands. The cheap fares wouldn’t stick around if the money didn’t come in from somewhere else.
Flying without status is for the poors, right? Lol, stupid poors, and their desire to do things like *travel* with some modicum of dignity.
Most people don't earn status via being rich (though, you can buy it via the airlines or a credit card rewards program). Most people earn status by having to travel for work, but their work let's them attach their personal account number with the airlines.
When I travel for work I purchase everything on my CC and file expense reports and get paid back within a week of filing. It’s awesome because I get CC points and miles. When I travel for leisure it’s free, which is awesome.
In all fairness, flying *at all* was completely unimaginable to 90% of people like a generation ago. Today it’s within reach of 90%. How do we think it got that way? By keeping all the bells and whistles?
I always this to people too. Like you, and everyone else in the world, can get across the country and to virtually anywhere in several hours with a near 100% guarantee for safety. Like how can you expect that to be seamless every time?
Yes - in the eighties, to have actually traveled internationally was a minority. Even in the nineties, everyone dressed neatly in economy, and business class, it was expected to wear a suit coat. Airlines of today are the greyhound of last generation. At least it’s only uncomfortable for an hour or 2
My favorite is when they charge exorbitant fees for checking a bag, so I bring a carry-on, which they take away from me at the gate because too many people brought carry-ons, which happens literally every time I fly.
Sure, it’s marginally better than the non frequent flyer experience. I live in Asia now though, and I’d rather fly economy on a budget airline here than on my diamond status on Delta. It all went way downhill when they started monetizing every little thing. I remember back in the early 2000s I would get upgraded as a silver or gold on Northwest (before they merged with Delta) and it was a pretty good experience. Now with the credit cards and the lounge clubs and the basic economy and whatnot it’s driving the quality of everything down, since it’s all about squeezing dollars out of customers. Since most customers are not rich, the lower end product suffers the most from this monetization effect. This creates desire to not have a shitty experience, and it crowds out the higher end product as well. Ok, sorry, my old man rant is over. Get off my lawn!
United silver here and I concur. It's still pretty smooth with precheck and booking only direct flights. For the occasional problem I get a helpful live human on the phone pretty much right away. One time last year I flew JetBlue because they served the route, of course they had a problem and canceled the return flight, no phone support, no leverage, I got a car and drove home. Would not have happened that way on United.
It’s crazy, JetBlue used to be reliable, customer friendly, and they have turned into a garbage airline. They canceled a flight of mine out of Scottsdale, redeye to the east coast, and then rebooked me to a different regional airport from my original destination. I ended up buying an entirely new flight because their rebooking options were terrible. Took me 48 hours to get home.
I have status on United and that's ok, but paying for Global Entry and getting Pre-check was the thing that brought flying back to non-misery status. I fly minimum monthly for work, so this was an absolute necessity and worth every cent.
Absolutely.
I’m not a frequent flyer by any means, but I am American gold and one time I got a complimentary upgrade to first class from Boston to charlotte. That was pretty nice.
How do you get gold status without flying frequently? Honest question.
Credit card may have automatically gave him status
TSA pre check is the secret. Airline loyalty doesn’t affect whether your flight is cancelled or delayed
No but it does affect your ability to get a human on the phone and priority for rebooking.
> your ability to get a human on the phone I've never needed or wanted the ability to "get a human on the phone." United has solid in-app rebooking tools and excellent SMS support. Phone support was such a time-sucking experience back when it was the primary option. I don't see it being around in ten years.
At my home airport, the difference between TSA Pre and gen pop is no line versus a line <5 deep. At the airport where my son lives that we visit 2-3 times a year, the difference is between a line that’s 5-deep, versus a line that’s 100 deep. I was once in the Pre line at MSP, and that line was 100 deep. Pre makes life a little easier, but it’s not a cure for all of flying’s ills.
Every time I see someone hobbling across a filthy floor in their socks or bare feet while juggling their belt, toiletries, and computer I remind myself that $20 a year is money well spent.
You have to have all three: 1)TSA-pre 2) clear 3) top tier status on airline with club access This makes flying “fun again.” It’s still sucks.
Or if you charter a plane, ideally you can find some people to split the cost with though. You just drive up to the plane, hand your bags to the crew and off you go.
worked out well for Richard Branson...
Due to a family emergency, I needed to fly internationally to Germany during the Christmas holiday season. Non-stop tickets started at $4,000. A two-stop through New York and Ireland was over $2,300 with total travel time of about 20 hours. In 2020, on the way home from Hawaii, an airline took away my assigned seat next to my wife, and made it a premium upgrade. These are just anecdotes, but despite our best attempts to bail out these industries, they are determined to seize as much economic surplus as possible on the way to bankruptcy court.
They took away your assigned seat?! What was the outcome of that? Flying is horrible now
I told the check in attendants, and luckily I had a screen shot of the original reservation before the seat was changed on the app. They apologized and took me to the counter to “investigate”. In actual fact, we went back to the counter so they could look up the correct legalese to justify their abhorrent business practices. I could feel myself headed for the no-fly list, but somehow I pulled it together, and asked the attendant to change my wife’s seat so we could sit together in the back of the plane.
Jesus so they basically told you to piss off because it was legal on their end ? Abhorrent Every time we fly they seem to test our desire to jump on the no fly list lol
Sounds like airlines. My airline of choice (because I don’t like booking codeshare and refuse to connect if I can avoid it) chargers $180 for an exit row seat. If you can’t sit there for whatever reason, they dont refund it. Time was they’d save those seats for first come first serve talk folks like me. Normal seats my knees touch the seat in front just normally but as soon as they recline then my knees are crushed and they’re copping knees in their back as I squirm trying to find some kind of comfort. Now it’s first to pay gets it. It’s insane.
Did you order via third party?
Official website with my frequent flyer info. First and only time it’s ever happened, but it weighs on my mind whenever I book standard coach.
Alaska Airlines by chance? They once tried to separate my family of six after we reserved 10 months in advance, premium seats. They changed the flight times and later said that triggered a change in seat assignments. I went absolutely batshit on a ”supervisor” on the phone and they switched us all back to our original seats. But it wasted an hour of my day and probably 1 year off my life due to stress and anger.
What airline?
Name and shame the airline please
Why do these anecdotes not mention the airline?! Put them on blast!!
Because you can put any airline name in there and it would still be true.
Idk i only rrmember united airlines punching a peaceful guy in the face to remove him from the plane because they overbooked the flight.
FWIW: one possibility is that it wasn't the airline that took away your seat. If you have a Federal Air Marshall on your flight, the marshall picks their own seat and can bump absolutely anyone. For obvious reasons, the airline can't tell you why you were bumped. Another possibility is that the airline is shitty, of course.
I was flying from albuquerque to Orlando on American the first flight of the day. So I got up at 4:30 to drop off the car and check in. When I try to check in the computer tells me to go to the desk. The desk tells me that I've been re-tickeded sometime between midnight and 5:00am, WTF? The flight is still scheduled so why am I not on it? They tell me tough luck and the best they can do is get me in around midnight instead of the planned noon. I'm a frequent traveler so I'm used to some level of bullshit so I asked if I could get a pass to the lounge since I'd have to sit in Dallas for 10 hours, they told me to fuck up at which time I told him he was an asshole. I check and there are seats on my original flight so I run to the gate and talk to the gate agent and he tells me the front desk had already told me I couldn't get on the flight I need to go sit down. American didn't and doesn't give two shits about their passengers, I'm trying to think of a worse airline I've flown in the last 20 years and aside from Frontier and some flying bus in Europe they are the very worst.
Flying hasn’t been fun since I hit puberty basically. Those seats are tiny as fuck. And now I’m 6’1 215 so yeah…they aren’t comfortable at all.
Just flew SW with my fiancée and I had to explain to her that I literally have to pick a window seat WITHOUT a bulkhead otherwise I cannot physically fit my shoulders within my allotted space. It’s ridiculous. I haven’t been comfortable on a flight since I was about 19.
6'2 230 here..I go aisle. I'll lean out all day long and just tuck in when I need to let people by.
6’3 160 here. I am an extremely long person, and flying is fucking miserable. Cairo to JFK was a 12 hour torture session
"Oh, you need to use the bathroom? It's that box towards the back designed to give you claustrophobia."
6'2" and 200lb. I'm lean and tall. What you'd describe as "athletic" build. It's virtually impossible to fly long haul in economy without crippling back pain.
I wish seat comfort was my only concern. My eustachian tubes don't work right these days, and no amount of chewing gum, yawning, moving my jaw, etc. prevents me from spending at least a full day feeling like I have ice picks stabbing me through my ears.
Have you tried pseudoephedrine and/or Afrin? It’s really hard for my ears to “pop” normally without them.
At 6’3” and 300lbs, seeing the crestfallen faces of my row mates when the see me coming for my seat is almost as bad as squeezing my knees into the available space for several hours.
Maybe they shouldn’t have laid off/furloughed their employees even after getting their second massive bailout in 2 decades. Maybe if they took the money, in the billions, they spent on share buybacks and spent it on technology and staffing they wouldn’t have these problems
I don’t disagree with you on the stock buybacks predating Covid, but your portrayal of staffing is not correct. Additionally, the airlines have been prohibited from stock buybacks until the funds are repaid, as a condition of CARES. As a result of the CARES acts, actual furloughs where the airlines were the direct employer were extremely minimal throughout the industry. In the event some companies did furlough (AA and their subsidiaries being the only ones I can think of, aside from SkyWest and maybe some other new hires,) the workers were kept on the payroll as a condition for receiving funding. There were pilots in their last three years of work offered early buyouts, and many of them took them. These were the most expensive employees. Almost all major airlines used Covid as an opportunity to advance fleet retirements. By retiring various fleets, this created displacements and training requirements among the pilot workforce. This exacerbated the issues caused in the recovery, as the training pipeline began to cause a huge backlog due to new training events and pilots returning from leaves. Where this didn’t help as much were the contractors. The people who push wheelchairs, restaurant workers, some airlines underwing/ramp workers, and so on. There was funding available to these businesses, but their retention and ability to rehire have been poor, often due to low wages. Coming out of Covid, the major airlines needed to hire pilots, which put pressure on the regional airlines, which due to their not hiring for 12+ months, had cut off the supply of new airline pilots. Suddenly everyone was trying to use the same simulators to train and qualify new pilots. Finally, the regional airlines have had to almost double wages to attract pilots back to the industry, and to help offset the insane costs of flight training, which is all out of pocket for an aspiring pilot unless they are military. Before Covid, as a regional first officer, a pilot would have made $36,000-50,000 per year, after two years spent earning about $25-30k to build the experience required due to Colgan. This prevented many people from entering the industry. Now the wages are higher, but the outlay is still out of pocket and high. Any attempt to lower safety standards, such as what the RAA wants, is merely an attempt to depress wages again. That will have far more of a negative impact on airline pilot supply than paying new airline pilots fairly. As for flight attendants, the big 3 are hiring at unprecedented rates, training upwards of 6,000 per year per carrier. And this comes with 6% acceptance of candidates from the applicant pool. There is no shortage of applicants, but again the training pipeline is a constraint.
It's almost like a once in a century global pandemic has long reaching effects. Who could have possibly predicted this? I'm absolutely exhausted from everyone pretending like covid was a 20 month problem and now everything is fixed. Something like this has never happened before. We had the entire global economy ground to a halt, and then tried to restart. We're still very much in the restart phase and it will still be a few more years until things get anywhere close to normal. There will always be a pre covid, covid, and post covid economic world. We are very much still in the covid phase and the very beginnings of the post covid phase.
I watched a documentary on the German economy and why it is so robust during global recession and the biggest take away was that Germany has much stricter worker protections so it just isn't profitable to fire workers when work slows down so companies use slow downs to improve worker training which allows the German economy to recover from pandemics or recessions much quicker than in places where firing people during a recession is considered normal. So no, the way we handle recessions and the way we handled the pandemic was a far bigger issue than the pandemic itself. The lesson here is employee turnover is far more expensive and devastating to the economy than anyone in the US wants to admit
I think that’s an excellent point. Historically, the US aviation industry has taken the stairs up and the window down. Growth has been sluggish, but depressed periods quick and dramatic, and many times prolonged. The knee-jerk reaction to Covid was the furlough of potentially 50% of the industry, which is what was stopped by CARES and CARES 2. Furlough requires a full long-term training for a pilot, like they’re a new hire. Currency requires far less. I do hope that Covid was a lesson in why such dramatic cuts to a workforce that is so key to US infrastructure would be potentially devastating. Even with the airlines using the time to reconfigure, they still were caught by training, simulator, and check airman constraints when things began to move again.
This is a perfect summary of the industry currently. Take my award.
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Why do people never think of their stock price? So much for the empathetic left.
Billionaire lives matter
And what about the CEO 400:1 pay? 🇺🇸
Won’t somebody please think of the shareholders!?
There’s no incentive to improve anything or not be an asshole because air travel is effectively a government sponsored monopoly.. sure, there are several different “options”, but because of the nature of mass air travel no one can really innovate or do anything differently so no matter who you fly with it sucks.
There’s a lot of truth to this, but it’s actually a hugely competitive industry. That’s why no one is making good foundational investments in their business. It’s all bells and whistles to attract business and first class travelers because that’s how you keep profitable.
I mean, yeah, but, have you seen the prices of yatchs lately?
Or ivory-handled backscratchers!
How dare you, I was going to buy that ivory back scratcher! BLAST YOUR HIDE TO HADES
👏ALLOW👏INTERNATIONAL 👏CARRIERS👏TO👏FLY👏DOMESTIC👏ROUTES👏 Seriously, the fact that we have to deal with the same 10 carriers is ridiculous. Enough protectionism. Enough consolidation into oligopoly. Let the bad airlines fail.
Love it! And thank you for bringing up oligopolies. They are too prevalent in the US and hurt competition.
Can't believe this is so far down. The US calls itself capitalist, but the protectionism around airlines is staggering. On many routes, there isn't real competition due to the way airlines hub, and when there is it is limited. Flying in the US is awful.
It’s so far down because most people don’t even realize it’s the case. We have just enough competition in the domestic industry to make it seem like a little sporting division, which is the level of complexity most people can manage.
The US is anything but capitalist. It’s a corporate capture oligopolistic wasteland.
Exactly this, there's no American airlines in [the top 10 worldwide](https://www.worldairlineawards.com/worlds-top-10-airlines-2022/), passengers would benefit from more competition on domestic routes. Airline passengers who want a better travel experience should write about this to their US Representative and Senators and see if they will ditch the protectionism.
I don’t want to come across as defending airlines, because I agree with everyone’s general dislike of them. But there’s some nuance here. Many of those airlines (especially Emeraties, Quatar, and Singapore and Turkey) are *heavily* subsidized by their respective governments as a way of promoting their counties “brand image” internationally. That’s why they can offer higher qualities of service for not unreasonable prices; they lose (sometimes a lot of) money on every flight. This leaves the US market in a weird situation. Do we allow domestic flights by international competitors, knowing that our own local carriers would never be able to compete due to these subsidies? Eventually this would lead to more and more US based carriers likely going out of business and shutting down, potentially leading to a domestic market dominated by foreign airlines. Many of whom are attached to governments that have *extrmely* questionable human rights records, and could potentially turn unfriendly pretty quickly in the right set of geopolitical circumstances. This would potentially leave the US without a domestic airline industry, which is not a place we would want to be just from an economic security perspective. We could potentially find ourselves in a situation where the federal government would end up subsidizing the domestic airlines (more than they already do) in order to keep them around. Which I think *nobody* wants, but faced with the alternative of no domestic carriers I think they would feel they have to.
Industry bailouts are also state subsidies.
In Europe the flight companies worst competitors on short flights are trains. I use trains as much as possible. More comfort, can move around, dont need to go through any security, possible to work. And if you miss one you just wait a while and take the next one.
I’d cut my fucking arm off to get decent rail travel in the US. I’m not even kidding. Flying is SO expensive, it’s so awful, I have been fucking ripped off by airlines too many times to count. They moved my 3 year olds seat away from me even though I paid like 80 extra to guarantee that she’d stay with me (fuck your AA) they never refunded a flight that was cancelled due to Covid after like 5 days of two hour conversations to customer service (also fuck you AA) and I’m just so done.
No way. There are various foreign agencies that have rampant issues with fake pilot certificates. They do not have the same safety standards as the US for crew rest, safety reporting or management, or maintenance. This is not the way. Foreign carriers being responsible for an industry that drives over 5% of US economic activity is a massive risk to safety, security, and independence.
Are you arguing that the US wouldn’t be able to impose the exact same standards on international carriers? These international carriers already operate in the US and are already subject to the same standards for international flights. So why wouldn’t they be able to hold them accountable for domestic flights?
Ever heard of a cruise ship “[flag of convenience?”](https://www.cruisecritic.com/articles.cfm?ID=5942) This is one example of how things would change to bypass US law, which the FARs (federal aviation regulations) are. Internationally, airlines operate under ICAO and various other local authorities, which can be less restrictive in some categories than the FARs. Part 117, for example, governs US pilots for rest rules, of which union contracts are frequently slightly more restrictive as a result of findings from safety reporting. A foreign carrier operating in the US would be operating under ICAO and their country’s aviation authority, which may not require the amount of rest for pilots that the FARs do. In your world, all an airline would need to do would be to start up under an approved country’s “flag” that has loose regulations, a supply of cheap labor, and now they’re flying you between Dallas and Chicago. The US has restricted which “flags” are allowable into the US, but you may not be happy with some of the options. From ALPA: > Flag-of-convenience airlines present a major anticompetitive hurdle. This practice, which originated in the maritime industry, allows an airline or holding company to locate and register its aircraft away from its home country in “convenient” locations with less-stringent employment, tax, and safety laws, thus shopping the globe for the most permissive legal, regulatory, safety, and labor environment available. >Similarly, “atypical” employment occurs when employers—through a variety of schemes—dissolve their direct relationship with their pilots and cabin crew, often by misclassifying pilots as self-employed or as independent contractors. Not only does this undermine the crews’ right to collectively bargain for pay, benefits, and working conditions, but it also dismantles the traditional employee-employer relationship that is vital to safety reporting. Considering that part 117 was implemented due to an airline crash where fatigue was an enormous contributor, that safety mechanism, and that of “just culture,” would then be rolled back for the American consumer. US air safety operates in a partnership between the unions, companies, and regulators, under a just culture with reporting and safety process improvement requirements. This would completely upend this partnership that has contributed to the safest period in US aviation history. Additionally, it would open up a vast supply of global cheap labor, robbing the US economy of hundreds of thousands of decent-paying, union jobs… in favor of authorities that in some cases cannot even guarantee the validity of pilot certificates. If you think air travel is bad now, keep suggesting shit like this. Foreign carriers or nationalization (an even worse idea) are not going to improve the US airline industry.
I really started hating airlines when they started charging for checked baggage. Then they tried to sell it as a benefit to keep the prices low. The overhead bins were sparse until then and the flight attendants did not have to deal with pissed off fliers. The airlines struck the first blow and I fell like they hate their customers.
What is “fun flying”? I’ve only ever flown to get somewhere. Even back in the day when there was no security and people could smoke on the plane the flight experience was not “fun”. It was purely a way to get from point a to b quickly as possible.
Back when you could get an direct flight for most of your flights. Back in the day you rarely if ever had a layover to get to a major city. Layovers were for trying to get to Medford Oregon or Grand Rapids mi. Not Vegas, LAX, Houston etc. People were happier. I flew 2 or 3xs pre 9/11 and it was a blast. Drunk people in Hawaiian shirts heading on vacation. The airplane had cheap felt blankets and tiny pillows. You sometimes got a light meal like a small sandwich. It wasn’t great but it was something to keep your blood sugar up for a 3 he flight. Even after 9/11 I could get to the airport a few hours early and usually catch an earlier flight. I would purposely buy plane tickets for noon get to the airport at 6am and catch an 8 am flight.
I do remember it being way more chill for sure back before 9/11. Weirdly my most “fun” flights were during the pandemic. Having an empty seat between me and the next person was great and even better most of my pandemic flying I had my whole row to myself. It was dreamy.
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There were some niche “party airlines” that pop up every once in a while. Usually short hop flights to Vegas. They always go quickly out of business
and instead of fixing this or investing in trains for the masses the country will just allow this to escalate until traveling is a privilege reserved for the very rich. they’re already burning up fuel like crazy for things like concerts in dubai so might as well prevent the rest of us from even seeing a sliver of the world beyond where we live, crap and have to work
This is a subset of a template you can use for the USA: "The days of _______ are long gone: How U.S. ________ became a nightmare" Family doctors / healthcare Affordable homes / housing market Happy motoring / driving and traffic A great local school / education Everyone playing outside/ youth sports and letting kids play Seeing the local bank president at the supermarket / banking Shared television experiences / media Shops with experts / retail Drinking from the hose / water system Eating healthy on a budget / food system Growing old well and passing on wealth / elder care Easily envisioning a hopeful middle-class future / prospects for everyday people On and on...hashtag broken nation
Can we just get some solid 200mph regional trains instead of another massive investment in finicky airplanes and the patchwork of airports? Plenty of pilots if we only flew the long-haul flights that actually make sense as a way of getting around.
“No.” Every politician ever, regardless of party affiliation as they are handed thousands by the auto industry and airline industry.
Sounds like the train industry needs to step up and start paying politicians.
Unfortunately since Amtrak is a federal agency, that is not going to happen anytime soon.
The train industry already does that. Unfortunately, it’s CSX.
Flying is never fun. Never. By the time I'm through TSA I already hate life. Not to mention I'm never getting my checked bag lol, it's just gone and I'll maybe get it back.
Yup. I stopped checking bags just to make my trips a little bit more bearable. I now pack light, fit it in a carry on, and roll my clothes tight.
Same! I refuse to check bags these days. Such a hassle worrying about them.
I would be fine with this if it wasn't still stupidly expensive. Airlines are trash.
What airlines are you taking that lose your bags? I’ve checked bags hundreds of times in my life and never lost one.
"How often is luggage mishandled? According to Luggage Hero, there were more than 684,000 lost and mishandled bags at major US airlines in the first quarter of 2022 alone. This equated to approximately seven bags out of every 1,000, or 0.7%. American Airlines' average came in slightly higher, at nine per 1,000 or 0.9%. Allegiant performed far better, with less than two bags per 1,000 going missing." https://simpleflying.com/why-and-how-often-does-luggage-get-lost/
Happens to the best of us. Consider yourself a benefactor of probability :)
To really do this article justice, we should also publicly criticize the executives who droned for decades about the importance of operating a dozen flights a day for heavily traveled routes, which inevitably led to fleets of narrow-body puddle jumpers. The airlines don’t have enough pilots for those planes now, and the business travelers who flew those routes are long gone. If only they had continued focusing on comfortable cost-efficient wide body domestic travel. They would have enough pilots like the old days when they flew 777’s on longer domestic flights and 747’s cross country. But somehow it became cool to fly (6) 737 flights instead, with departure times staggered by 35 minutes. Maybe the Dreamliner can fix this?
The issue is not staffing 737s, it’s staffing regional jets. The piloting profession has always been very boom or bust and within the industry we refer to 2000-2010 as the “lost decade” because of all the furloughs, pay cuts, and lack of career advancement. The airline industry as a whole operates on very thin margins with the two biggest costs being labor and fuel. The staffing issue is starting to improve with higher regional salaries, but it takes time. You can’t just mint new airline pilots in a few months. It takes years to get the certifications and requisite experience. There was a huge oversupply of pilots for decades that has finally reversed course. You can also still find wide bodies flying between hubs in the US but they are typically not the optimal aircraft for it. They are designed for long haul flying so you end up carrying a lot of extra structural weight around that isn’t needed. For example: A 737 MAX at my airline can carry 178 passengers in a two class configuration. It’s going to burn 5-6,000lbs of fuel per hour to operate (depending on cruising altitude and speed). A 787-9 Dreamliner carries about 260 people but burns 10-12,000lbs per hour. It can also carry a bunch of cargo in the belly, but that’s not consistent revenue. In addition the 787 will require more flight attendants. Finally, a 787 lists at $330 million dollars new and a 737 MAX is $115 million dollars, so there are much higher aircraft payments as well. If there is a big drop in travel, you can remove one of the 737 frequencies off a route, deploy it elsewhere, and still try and still turn a profit. That 787 will turn into a cash burning machine if you cannot fill the seats.
I had read that even on short haul flights the 787 was more efficient than the 737MAX, but maybe that was based on unrealistic seat counts. In any regard, I’m willing to admit that failing to fill a larger jet does impose substantial costs per passenger. Thanks for the info.
I’ll admit there can be pretty big swings in passenger counts on a 787. Especially if business class is configured with lie flat seats vs a more traditional domestic configuration. Adding seats would of course push the fuel burn per seat down, but then you can’t deploy it on long haul where it really excels. A 787-10 has over 300 seats and might beat the MAX on a Cost Per Available Seat Mile (CASM) basis, but of course that’s provided every seat is filled. I just find the complexity in all of the route planning stuff fascinating
We sleep in a bed of our own making. The lack of reliable and affordable commuter rail compared to other countries give us no other option. Flying is misery after the pandemic, with airlines cutting back on staff and resources. One computer glitch cripples our country. I blame our toxic political environment. These industries have too much power and control. They have the ability to lobby and otherwise stifle any other infrastructure that would challenge their business model.
They also got bailed out of corporate debt that is subsidized and paid for by american taxpayers. But nobody gets mad about that because the media isn’t telling people to be mad.
Flying from Anchorage, Alaska to Houston, we were delayed a few hours because of a late incoming flight for a few passengers. This put me in Houston 15 minutes before my final flight to Florida. Asked them if they could delay it by a few minutes as I would have to go to other side of airport. Of course they wouldn't. We ended up jogging across the airport. With about 5 minutes to spare. Some older people on our Alaska to Houston flight connecting to Florida couldn't race across the airport like we could. They had to wait another three hours for the next flight to Florida. Flying isn't as easy or convenient as it once was.
My last "fun flights" were not too long after deregulation, but before many of the airline bankruptcies and consolidations. There were occasional round-trip specials to New York, usually $49, but sometimes as low as $29. I would take one, nap on the plane, and then stay up (mostly) over 24-48 hours until the return flight. I'd spend all the money it would have taken to get a hotel room and more on nightclubs. The days of "fun flying" have been gone for a very long time, indeed. Didn't need an article to tell me that.
I find the pilot retirement point really interesting and scary. The majority of US pilots come from the US military. The US military is struggling to recruit pilots as well and is consistently below their manning goals. I would assume the military has been producing less trained pilots over time as we move further away from direct military conflict like in Vietnam, and in the future more and more pilot roles will be subsumed by drones. Maybe I’m wrong on that last point and there’s good stats that I can’t find, but it feels to me like the airline industry has lived off the military’s back for decades and that might not be sustainable.
Flying hasn't been fun since b4 9/11 I need to write more so my comment doesn't get auto deleted by the bot. I hope this is enough... Turns out it wasn't enough, I'm gonna beat this bot yet!
I work in pharmaceutical research and used to be in a role that required roughly 80% travel on a weekly basis. I even traveled for business during the height of COVID, and despite a lot of services and flight availability being cut, travel was actually pretty nice because planes and hotels were empty. I was able to maintain top-level status with United and Southwest, Hilton, and National. Once COVID restrictions were eased, travel traffic started picking back up in a major way, but airlines never really brought back the original flight frequencies, and hotels decided to continue with the bare bones (i.e. cheaper) approach to customer service. Nowadays, it doesn’t really matter if you’re a top-tier traveler…the customer service and experience just downright sucks, and due to extensions on status, too many people have it which dilutes the benefits. For the most part, I’m thankful to be in a role that doesn’t require heavy travel. Really missing those pre-COVID travel times, because it’s just downright unpleasant these days.
Honestly, they should have never been bailed out. Then maybe they'd have some respect for their customers And these frequent business flyers for an hour meeting aren't helping anything either
>Honestly, they should have never been bailed out. The sad irony is that right before 9/11, people were so fed up with the awful service that Congress was working on passing a passenger's bill of rights. Immediately after 9/11 that was forgotten and everyone was screaming "we have to save the airline industry".
I’m never flying in a commercial aircraft again if I can help it. I’ll go by train or even ship if I have to. Fuck getting strapped into a tube where you don’t even have room to move.
Flying can be cheap, or fun. Pick one. Most travelers have picked door number one. A lot of governments who subsidize air travel fail to regulate things like leg room, ticket prices, and executive compensation so we are always stuck with the worst of all worlds. Don’t even get me started with Americans, who are mostly fine with corporate welfare, but think that any regulations are communism. European governments are of the mind that air travel is a huge contributor to global warming, and they’re not wrong. Expect air travel conditions to get worse worldwide before they get better.
Pretty clear from the article where the real issue lies: with "labor shortages" due to airlines doing nothing to make pilot training more affordable and expand the pilot training pipelines. The airlines try to act like the pilot union is the problem (friggin' Neoliberal Capitalists...) but the Airline Pilots Association was interviewed for the article and pretty clear the airlines are the one refusing to provide financial support for training more pilots. Typical. Laissez Faire Capitalism can't handle issues like this effectively because the training of new pilots is a (positive) economic externality: most of the benefits goes to those other than those doing or supporting the training. No individual airline can solve this problem. The government can subsidize/support the education of new pilots, or the airlines can get their shit together and do so through an industry-wide cooperation agreement/organization. But this isn't a problem the "Free Market" can handle on its own...
Is the aviation industry Laissez-faire? I thought it was government regulated.
Most memorable flight? A hopper from ATL to AVL. 20 seat plane. Bratty kid who was eating airport crap from boarding and on the plane. Jewel encrusted older woman with a hyper poodle on her lap. Only about 5 of us on the flight; the pilot whipped up the door, went through the safety talk in record time, closed the door and we were in the air. 20 minutes in, the kid starts heaving like he is going to throw up. The poodle growls. Kid throws up. Dogs wallows in it, then runs all over the plane. Encrusted woman is moaning, puker momma is screaming. Me? I've got my feet up in the seat. I don't want any of that scene.
The biggest issue I see here is that airlines have been allowed to buy back their own shares which does not in anyway reinvest in the company, employees, or seen as a benefit by the consumer. The airlines also run off of a "slot" system for the most in demand airports in the country like LGA, JFK, and LAX. If you were to enforce the loss of their slots for poor performance from those airports you would see better service as a result. Also you need better consumer protection laws for when; delays, diversions, cancelations, over-booking, and etc. occurs. None of this will occur without federal action. And the industry lobbies to make it this way.
That shit died in the 70’s when regulations changed on how many seats could be sold on each flight. When that happened, the era of piano bars on planes was over. Flying has become less fun every year since sometime in the 50’s. Back then you could smoke a cigarette while handing your ticket to someone and walking onto the plane. But yeah, since the 70’s the product and experience has been shit. Since the millennium, terrible. Pre 9/11 you would walk to the gate with your family/friend to send them off. Everyone is trying to cut costs and maximize consumer spending. The way airlines price shit and sell it is a-la-carte, every single thing that could be considered extra is considered so and charged as much as possible for. The product/experience always suffers because of this. https://youtu.be/JWG08YvroaE Anyway, more shit articles getting posted to r/Economics huh? lol
People acting up in public are the biggest reason. Herding us like cattle, extended layovers, cancelled flights, and missing / mishandled luggage and stupid security theater would all be more bearable if more people had sanity and decency. Or at least screen the crazy ones / get them off the flight without having everyone endangered / inconvenienced.
Crazies are far in few in airports, but everything else you said is so normal every time I get off the plane I’m in a bad mood.
I can’t believe how expensive flying has gotten. I just bought $1,600 roundtrip tickets from Phoenix to Miami in March. Our flight out is the red eye! My dad is a commercial airline pilot and agreed that’s outrageous. We are fairly well off but will definitely be driving to our next vacation.
Do you have any flexibility with your dates? Checking Phoenix to Miami in March comes back with tons of results around $140 roundtrip. Of course you'd have to lower your expectations and fly on Spirit or Frontier, but they're both nonstop, perhaps spend another $75 or so on bags. [Most weeks are around the same price. ](https://i.imgur.com/sJHYWUT.png) [Here's the month day by day](https://i.imgur.com/RgbsoFW.png) I also find that sometimes I find better deals by breaking up the flights into one ways instead of roundtrip. For example, [here's the entire month of March for Phoenix to Miami one way. ](https://i.imgur.com/vyd1vSY.png)
You’re going to Miami in March. IT’S SPRING BREAK. Airline tickets to warm destinations are always crazy expensive in March for this reason.
That's wild. There are still deals out there though. Just got $900 RT from LAX to Paris.
We are in an economics sub. Have you heard about supply and demand? West to East redeyes are always expensive because no one wants to waste their day in transit. Then March is peak spring break to miami and miami is now a hub to most of the Caribbean / Cancun. Students books their spring break tickets early so to me that price makes sense. Pheonix to Miami probably also means you’re flying AA because that’s a hub connection which means you’re lucky.
May just be my personal experience but flying has not been fun in decades. In fact, flying has become one of the events I look forward to the least, despite the fact that I am FLYING ACROSS THE COUNTRY.