A rare miss from TFP - seems like it happens about once every other week which is a damn good hit rate.
How do you publish an article that purports to claim everything we know about the success of airline deregulation is wrong without including facts and figures?
It seems to be common knowledge that prior to 1978, flying was an incredible expensive endeavor primarily for the upper class and since then, it’s been democratized for the people. If that’s wrong and the data shows that prices have actually not come down, that’s huge news! But you’d think some actual information would be included in an eleven minute article.
It seems clear that we could all stipulate that a once-in-a-century policy disaster like the Covid response would shatter the travel industry and there’s plenty the airlines did wrong. So this article is the dog that didn’t bark.
If the author could show why pre-1978 was better than post-1978 and then offer up solutions on how to improve from where we are, he would do so. Instead, he spends an inordinate amount of space on side issues and non-sequiters.
I'm not an advocate of re-regulation - on practically anything - but to state that "prior to 1978, flying was an incredible (sic) expensive endeavor primarily for the upper class" is quite wrong. I graduated high school in 1974 and I managed to make my way via plane to Chicago, Washington, and Newark quite a bit without breaking my tiny piggy bank, and I grew up in a blue-collar part of Daytona Beach, FL that was rapidly becoming a ghetto. I attended college in Long Island, NY (yes, quite weird of me) and after an interminable bus ride home one winter, chose air flight for my twice-yearly visits home and my returns from then out. I usually had a choice between an awful flight that left really late from JFK, connected in Atlanta and arrived home in the wee hours of the morning - but the price was nice by what would come later: 65 bucks. I later chose to spend a few extra bucks (around $80) to fly on a plane that stopped once in Jacksonville. At around the same time, a friend of mine spent two months in Europe and his flight on British Airways was around $350 roundtrip. This gives lie to your statement about price. This also occurred at a time when our hometown airport had just one carrier - National Airlines departed sometime before I entered high school, and Delta didn't begin service there until around 1982. At the time I occasionally could not book a flight and my folks had to bring me to Orlando McCoy (now Orlando International, on the far side of Orlando from our town). At the time Orlando had a mere 25 departure gates but it did have - whoo hoo - the kind of jet bridges you'd find in big places such as Atlanta. The downside was, you'd lug your suitcase up a flight of stairs to get to it.
I grew up in Houston in a middle class family and went to college in Boston in the mid seventies. During the year I only flew home for summer and Christmas. One year I had saved enough money to pay for a flight home at spring break, which felt like a real luxury. Other than that, I spent spring break in the dorm and Thanksgivings with friends in Connecticut (traveling by bus). Deregulation, which came too late for my college years, would have made a profound difference in those decisions.
Agreed, one of the major problems in the US is in fact state ownership of airports. Pretty big whiff here, and no shortage of evidence to the contrary.
So, you're not alone in feeling this way about the state of air travel today. It's like the whole luxury experience of flying has been diluted down to something you'd find at your average retailer. Remember when airports used to be a showcase of sophistication and style? Now, it's all about the "airport hobo look."
But then you have this whole other world emerging – flying private. It's where the well-dressed folks have disappeared to, off in their own private hangars away from the rest of us. It's almost like they've created this exclusive club within the airport, leaving the rest of us to wonder what happened to the glamor of air travel.
It's kind of a mirage, isn't it? The fancy ones haven't vanished; they've just found a way to hide from the rest of us. It's a sign of the times, I guess – the haves and the have-nots, even in the world of airport terminals.
Actually diving into the figures would reveal that the airlines have largely been re-regulated, one bite at a time, in the dumbest way possible, by a diffuse set of bureaucrats who have no accountability to the people. TSA fee, Airport Fees, the cost of making an airliner that is EU/USA/EMEA compliant, security theatre, the consolidation of plane manufacturing - all this adds a regulatory burden that the big 4 can sustiain, and new challengers cannot.
The correct analogy is Ticketmaster - somehow, the President of these United States can talk about getting rid of paying a 40% markup on 'Junk Fees', but can't get a bill sponsored to cut back on these leeches? F to doubt.
As a whole flying was much worse recently - post 9/11, there were so many 4-6 hour Tarmac delays that 30 Rock had a Matt Damon guest spot making fun of how bad it was. Legislation corrected this, but more importantly the THREAT of legislation fixed this. Adapting to a whole new set of rules has massive costs even if in the long term it benefits the big guys.
The answer is Political - not mentioned, in all of this is the guy Pete Buttigieg is the man in charge of using the bully pulpit of his office to keep the bloodhounds of consumer captialism on something like a leash. Even with the authority he has, he has not done this.
So, why hand him - or Biden, or whatever horseshit Civil Aeronautics Board 2.0 they cook up - an ounce more of power?
Railroads blew up Palestine Ohio. Regulations to modernize train brakes, not enforced by this admin. Railroad Workers struck, not for pay but to have a sick day - Biden broke the strike even though the railroads could easily afford it. California shipping got so bad 100+ tankers were stuck in the harbor - California's long term plan is to ban a significant ammount of American trucks from operating in the state. The pattern shows that given more power, this admin would break the Pilot's union like a twig and then let local acedemic communists estabish a social credit score to see who gets to fly standing room only to keep things as green as possible.
The solution is political - Bush, Obama, and Trump managed to keep the situation well enough in hand that we could all live with it, given the prices. Current admin creates the 'crisis,' then the Free Press rewards the policy advisor who would hand them yet another Consumer Board that will probably not fix the price or treatment problem, but hand yet another tool to the strike breakers, price fixers, and the tech $ that will create an algorithm to help us find the only flight we could afford. Even the Atlantic wouldn't put this guy on.
Hi OTG. While I agree with the thrust of your post, the catastrophic disruptions are far more frequent than once a century. In the last quarter of a century we’ve had 9/11, SARS, the financial crisis, an Icelandic volcano and of course COVID. All were hugely costly to the travel industry. It does appear to me that the only way forward is a highly regulated but essentially free market approach. Not an easy thing for an unreconstructed Randian to say but there you go.
As a former Air Traffic Controller I can leak stories that would curl your toes. Suffice to say, I don't fly. For example, does any one believe that weather this year is any worse than other years? If you do, I have an EV SR71 to sell to you.
Unless your the one that did not make it. I am descended from.flight folks. Including the ones to space so I believe in air travel. But you have to be pretty naive to not see potential problems in the near future.
So I assume you don't drive, as drivers kill over 40,000 people every single year on our roads. You'd have to be seriously naive to not realize the factual and deadly truths about automobile travel.
You have to be seriously naive to engage in whataboutism. But on the topic of air travel, did you here about the mid-flight engine failure on the Southwest flight this week?
I just found an old ad from American quoting a $178 round trip ticket from LA to NY in 1977. And i just googled a price today and the first price that came up was $228. Median hosehold income in 1977 was $12,000 and its $68,000 today. So on a realtive basis one would spend 1.5% of your income in 1977 and 0.3% today. So it's 4.4x cheaper today. Not sure I care enough about having a hot meal and few inches of legroom to pay 4 4x more.
I haven't done the research, but I'll bet if you did it's stil much cheaper. Air travel is much more abundant today. And the real advantage is cheap travel. You can go anywhere for less than you could in 1977.
Depends on how long your flight is for meals and how tall you are for legroom. The seat shrinkage is my issue. If anyone is remotely overweight they are in your space. And they know it. I feel bad for them. And for me.
Well, on a relative basis you can buy a business ticket today for less than that coach ticket in 1977. Business is typically less than 4.4x more than coach today (typically 2 to 3 times coach). So apples to apples you are better off on cost (coach vs coach) or comfort (coach vs business) 1977 vs 2023.
What people want is business class comfort today for coach cost today. That intersection point never existed and doesn't exist today. But it's much closer today than 1977 (ie business class today is cheaper than coach in 1977 on a realtive basis)
True. About the desire for coach versus upgraded class anyway. And I am not that person. But 2023 coach is different than 1977 coach. So even the coach comparison is not apples to apples.
So compare today's business to yesterday's coach. Lower price and more comfort. Anyway you look at it the economics are better today. However, by drastically lowering the price we have expanded the number of people of flying, which in general is likely a very big positive for society. But more people increases the chances of absolute numbers of bad behavior. And with the instant media capture of those events we all become aware of the bad behavior.
I'm not sure of an economic way to solve that other than making the penalty for bad behavior very high.
I think yesterday's coach was more akin to today's business. Like everything (cell phones, electric cars, etc.) I guess when air travel was new people questioned the need so it was heavily marketed as glamorous. Which it was. People dressed to fly. You got cocktails and proper meals. Flight attendants were gracious. It was like being at a luxury hotel. But as it became accepted, then routine it lost the glamour. That is inevitable. But I think the airlines do themselves a disservice when they reduce themselves to nothing more than flying busses. That is just me. I don't fly that way. Well maybe in a very short flight. But I know you get what you pay for. So just set my fee. Give me what I pay for. And call it good. I think what you are trying to say with more people flying of course the incident of bad behavior increases because that's the way the trash acts. I do not agree with that. Pre-covid you had the occasional drunk and it was not class of seat specific. Covid stressed everybody. The airlines threw their staffs under the bus and some of them acted out. Some of them were already pretty full of themselves over TSA authority. Now I have been on several flights where they are downright nasty. Not to me personally, just in general. I take note. I have a three strike rule. United and SWA are both on my shite list. And I receive emails daily from SWA soliciting my business.
Oh I forgot, intelligent people who have been in transportation, especially flying, have been the Sec. of Trans. and they still have tough challenges. And petey's bona fides? He's gay and takes time off while the transportation system is in crisis to welcome his newborn. He should be a great dad. In fact, he should resign from Sec. of Trans. to be a full time dad. That had to be the best 3 months of a well run Trans Dept under joe's administration. I use to think Cheney and Rumsfeld where the most corrupt and worse politicians ever. joe's administration makes them look like Einstein with with an IQ of 1000%. Yes I know it doesn't go that high. Unless you are being compared to one of joe's cabinet members.
Very roughly, for the average price of a ticket in 1980, you can buy a first class ticket today. If you want 1980’s service, legroom, free bags, etc., you can buy it. Most people don’t.
It's not unnatural to want to get first-rate service for bargain prices, but it's not realistic. The safety record of our airline industry is miraculous -- tens of millions of people hurtling through space, eight miles above the ground, at nine miles a minute, and year after year without a fatality or significant injury. But luxury like that photo at the top of the article just isn't going to come with a $39 ticket.
Limiting taxiway delays (no one sits on a runway) to some reasonable maximum, perhaps. But regulating legroom? There are people who can only afford to fly when it is cheap, and cheap tickets means seats closer together. Airline jets are expensive to buy ($90 million and up), expensive to maintain, expensive to operate, and the pilots, flight attendants and mechanics all need to be paid. More legroom can be had, but not for a bargain-basement ticket price; mandate lots of comfy legroom and many people won't be able to afford to fly at all. Mandate luxurious service and cheap prices and the airlines will go out of business.
No body said it is not still available for a price. But you avoid the shrinkage issue. Which IMO is real. I have seen schematics for people to be stacked.
I worked in airline marketing during deregulation and flew a lot for business. Flying during regulation was infinitely better because, as many commenters say, there weren’t as many people flying.
The writer isn’t proposing that we go back to a time when few people could afford to fly to improve the flying experience. He’s proposing that we apply what we learned during regulation to support sustainable airline businesses instead of reacting to crises and spending trillions and still end up with hundreds of bankruptcies. For example, I suspect his book will share what was learned during regulation about balancing profitable long haul routes with less profitable short haul routes. If running an airline were less volatile, they could focus on making flying experiences better and compete based on value instead of cheap pricing. But you have to buy the book to find out.
I say that’s smart.
1) Why should he give away what he knows for free?
2) Applying learning from the past to make things better is so much smarter than copying the past (without a clue about what worked or what didn’t) because the numbers scale, when that is basically because the population is bigger and outsourcing makes a commodity offering cheaper.
3) Making something worth paying more for creates value for customers, employees, business partners, the cities served, etc - which is why the business can be resilient during a crisis instead of requiring government bailout.
It is so refreshing to hear that the next generation is more interested in making things better than moving fast to break things. Yeah!
I won't claim the airlines are necessarily well-run businesses. They suffer from the same tendency to short term thinking that all publicly traded companies do. But they are highly competitive, and that means they are exquisitely sensitive to price/demand signals. So we, the flying public, wind up getting exactly what we care most about: the cheapest possible ticket. And since they can lower the cost of providing their service by reducing amenities and squeezing more people into the plane, that's exactly what they have done.
It's a little dishonest to pine for the regulated pre-1978 era with only a passing hint at the fact that air travel was so expensive that ordinary Americans couldn't afford it. Hence, the term "jet set." And I don't see how the pre-1978 regime would have handled COVID any better.
The consensus, and there's tons of evidence for this, is that prices fell significantly as a direct consequence of deregulation, and the number of passengers skyrocketed as a result, not because they had better advertising.
"Airfares, when adjusted for inflation, have fallen 25 percent since 1991, and, according to Clifford Winston and Steven Morrison of the Brookings Institution, are 22 percent lower than they would have been had regulation continued (Morrison and Winston 2000). Since passenger deregulation in 1978, airline prices have fallen 44.9 percent in real terms according to the Air Transport Association. Robert Crandall and Jerry Ellig (1997) estimated that when figures are adjusted for changes in quality and amenities, passengers save $19.4 billion dollars per year from airline deregulation. These savings have been passed on to 80 percent of passengers accounting for 85 percent of passenger miles. The real benefits of airline deregulation are being felt today as never before, with LCCs increasingly gaining market share."
Ugh. None of that is responsive to anything I said and I am not really interested in a debate about this. The commenter I replied to said air travel was no longer viewed as the luxury it once was. To which I responded that air travel was novel (which places the time frame before the minutiae you supplied and as such well before regulation). In order to attract business air travel was marketed as luxurious and sold that way, which is likewise true. I, having lived through most of the time frame at issue, understand well both inflation and adjustment therefor. I actually think the adjustment figures are low. But here is why blind adherence to numbers is risky: sure flights are cheaper, both in terms of pricing and quality. Some of that is scaling. A lot of it is shrinkage, both in terms of space alloted and service provided. They do not even clean between flights anymore. The last two Southwest flights I was on (and they were the last ones for me period) the flight attendants instructed the passengers to clean-up before deplaning and they were not even nice about it. Southwest blew it with that Christmas 2022 fiasco. It pi$$ed me off (and I was only slightly inconvenienced) so I read up. Southwest is all about the shareholders and executive compensation. It cares not about the planes (even maintenance), the modern equipmemt needed to schedule flights and crews, the crews, or the amenities, much less the passengers. Gate personnel at the Nashville Airport called the cops on passengers stranded there and trying to get information. And before you chime in that they could get info online - No.They.Could.Not. A lot of it is overselling flights (to the point where just because you have a ticket is not assurance you will be accepted on the flight). A lot of it is inept federal bureaucracy. FWIW although I am very dubious of federal involvement in anything, I do believe in the instance of domestic and international air travel it is justified. But I need legitimate, well-reasoned regulation by a consortium of members of the regulated industry , consumers thereof, and bona fide experts schooled in the technology. None of which I'd provided by Mayor Pete from Indy. When he is in the office. I also think regulation of social media, you know, the self-proclaimed Town Square, is likewise required.
Both times actually. In the first one I just opined as to how the thought was implanted that flying was luxurious to start with. In the second one I pointed out that your link laden reply was not responsive to what I said and then critiqued your link-supported position. I stand by both comments.
The price/comfort “problem “ is a supply and demand issue. Plane manufacturing has not kept up with plane demand for decades. Take a look at Boeing and Airbus 10 year backlogs. Airlines have the leverage to charge a lot for an uncomfortable product because planes are full and there’s nowhere else to turn. It’s that simple and it’s not going to change. Government intervention will just make it worse.
A misleading headline. The article says next to nothing about “what to do about it.” Perhaps there is more in the book than just “reflect more carefully” on the past.
Toldeo is 45 minutes from Detroit's airport, which is a major hub. One could argue that the absence of flights to Toldeo shows the effectiveness of deregulation rather than the problems with it.
I can't believe this article didn't have one mention of the dreadful and intrusive post-9/11 "security" procedures. Also, part of the employee shortage is due to vaccine mandates, also not mentioned.
If I had known we were going to skip the "How to Fix It" part mentioned in the headline, I wouldn't have bothered reading this article. I didn't need to waste eight minutes of my life to learn that flying sucks.
The biggest problem is the pilot shortage. In the USA, pilots have to accumulate 1,500 hours of flying time before they can take the ATP pilot test to start training as a first officer with an airline. That requires at least 250 hours of instruction to get your commercial license, followed by usually additional training to get a multi=engine license, plus a lot of poor-paying jobs to built the hours to qualify for the ATP exam. There simply are not enough people who can afford this.
In most of the world, airlines take pilots right out of training school at perhaps 250-300 hours, and then develop them. Despite the fewer hours, that is probably safer, because the trainees start very early on with training on the commercial airliners that they are ultimately going to fly as captain or first officer. In the USA, you end up spending time on several different types of planes and thus have to UNLEARN some habits in order to properly fly a commercial airliner. Flying a Cessna Caravan is very different from flying a Boeing 737.
It is considered impossible to change this in the USA because if they do, the news media will run scare stories about having inexperienced pilots on commercial jets, and no member of Congress would vote for it.
The irony is that our largely leftist media, which always wants us to be more like Europe, would be lobbying AGAINST the very model of pilot training that European airlines use.
And on top of that, US pilots have one major advantage. English is the language of commercial aviation, so in other countries, pilots have to master English in addition to their flying skills. American pilots don't have this problem.
In the past, weren't most airline pilots former US Military pilots? Another unintended consequence of our reduced military? I'm asking, I don't have the data. Thanks.
I've noticed that, despite a long history of whining about how Europe is better, Leftists actually don't want to implement a lot of ideas that work well in Europe. European abortion laws and European school systems are just two additional examples of things the Left actually hates about Europe.
This is not much more than an advertisement for the author's book. For example there is zero discussion of what the solution to the problem is. I searched online and found this from a review: "Sitaraman’s solution is a return to government oversight, with regulation of prices and a licensing system to ensure that all cities receive service." OK. The FAA or someone is going to dictate prices? That has never worked. We could alternatively enforce existing laws on predatory pricing. When I fly from Washington, D.C. to California if I fly from Washington Dulles on United I pay a much higher price than if I fly out of Baltimore (a short drive away) where even United matches the low price offered by Southwest Airlines. When Southwest began flying out of Dulles, United lowered their price until SW left, and then raised their price back to the existing high levels. This is a clear violation of the Sherman anti-trust act, but our DoJ instead of investigating and prosecuting this sued Microsoft over their bundling of Windows with a web browser (remember the browser wars?). We need to open our skies to real competition! Another approach would be to allow foreign airlines to fly between the east and west coasts. We might even get lie flat seats that are offered internationally!
A rare miss from TFP - seems like it happens about once every other week which is a damn good hit rate.
How do you publish an article that purports to claim everything we know about the success of airline deregulation is wrong without including facts and figures?
It seems to be common knowledge that prior to 1978, flying was an incredible expensive endeavor primarily for the upper class and since then, it’s been democratized for the people. If that’s wrong and the data shows that prices have actually not come down, that’s huge news! But you’d think some actual information would be included in an eleven minute article.
It seems clear that we could all stipulate that a once-in-a-century policy disaster like the Covid response would shatter the travel industry and there’s plenty the airlines did wrong. So this article is the dog that didn’t bark.
If the author could show why pre-1978 was better than post-1978 and then offer up solutions on how to improve from where we are, he would do so. Instead, he spends an inordinate amount of space on side issues and non-sequiters.
The author finds a lot to complain about, much of it legitimate, but offers no solutions.
The title of the article included the words "what to do about it." There was nothing in the article that suggested what to do about it.
Absolutely right. Deregulation made flying accessible to far more people than in the past (https://www.travelandleisure.com/airlines-airports/history-of-flight-costs). Unfortunately, the policy excesses of the pandemic and continuing overregulation (https://www.cato.org/commentary/how-us-air-travel-can-get-little-its-groove-back) have made a mess.
Hey-are you the “It usually begins with Ayn Rand” guy? I enjoyed that book.
Almost! My father wrote that book (he passed away in 2017). I'm glad you enjoyed it. My own writing appears in Reason.
My bad. I should have known that- I receive the dead tree version of Reason every month. I was a donor back in the day.
Glad you’re here- between the libertarians and moderate libs we’ll find a way out of the current mess. Merry Christmas.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you!
I'm not an advocate of re-regulation - on practically anything - but to state that "prior to 1978, flying was an incredible (sic) expensive endeavor primarily for the upper class" is quite wrong. I graduated high school in 1974 and I managed to make my way via plane to Chicago, Washington, and Newark quite a bit without breaking my tiny piggy bank, and I grew up in a blue-collar part of Daytona Beach, FL that was rapidly becoming a ghetto. I attended college in Long Island, NY (yes, quite weird of me) and after an interminable bus ride home one winter, chose air flight for my twice-yearly visits home and my returns from then out. I usually had a choice between an awful flight that left really late from JFK, connected in Atlanta and arrived home in the wee hours of the morning - but the price was nice by what would come later: 65 bucks. I later chose to spend a few extra bucks (around $80) to fly on a plane that stopped once in Jacksonville. At around the same time, a friend of mine spent two months in Europe and his flight on British Airways was around $350 roundtrip. This gives lie to your statement about price. This also occurred at a time when our hometown airport had just one carrier - National Airlines departed sometime before I entered high school, and Delta didn't begin service there until around 1982. At the time I occasionally could not book a flight and my folks had to bring me to Orlando McCoy (now Orlando International, on the far side of Orlando from our town). At the time Orlando had a mere 25 departure gates but it did have - whoo hoo - the kind of jet bridges you'd find in big places such as Atlanta. The downside was, you'd lug your suitcase up a flight of stairs to get to it.
$350 in 1980 is $1,354 today and there are still flights to London for that price or less.
I grew up in Houston in a middle class family and went to college in Boston in the mid seventies. During the year I only flew home for summer and Christmas. One year I had saved enough money to pay for a flight home at spring break, which felt like a real luxury. Other than that, I spent spring break in the dorm and Thanksgivings with friends in Connecticut (traveling by bus). Deregulation, which came too late for my college years, would have made a profound difference in those decisions.
Agreed, one of the major problems in the US is in fact state ownership of airports. Pretty big whiff here, and no shortage of evidence to the contrary.
I agree with some of your comment but flying cattle cars are not my idea of the democratization of air travel.
Maybe it’s all in his book. I found this article really interesting.
So, you're not alone in feeling this way about the state of air travel today. It's like the whole luxury experience of flying has been diluted down to something you'd find at your average retailer. Remember when airports used to be a showcase of sophistication and style? Now, it's all about the "airport hobo look."
But then you have this whole other world emerging – flying private. It's where the well-dressed folks have disappeared to, off in their own private hangars away from the rest of us. It's almost like they've created this exclusive club within the airport, leaving the rest of us to wonder what happened to the glamor of air travel.
It's kind of a mirage, isn't it? The fancy ones haven't vanished; they've just found a way to hide from the rest of us. It's a sign of the times, I guess – the haves and the have-nots, even in the world of airport terminals.
Actually diving into the figures would reveal that the airlines have largely been re-regulated, one bite at a time, in the dumbest way possible, by a diffuse set of bureaucrats who have no accountability to the people. TSA fee, Airport Fees, the cost of making an airliner that is EU/USA/EMEA compliant, security theatre, the consolidation of plane manufacturing - all this adds a regulatory burden that the big 4 can sustiain, and new challengers cannot.
The correct analogy is Ticketmaster - somehow, the President of these United States can talk about getting rid of paying a 40% markup on 'Junk Fees', but can't get a bill sponsored to cut back on these leeches? F to doubt.
As a whole flying was much worse recently - post 9/11, there were so many 4-6 hour Tarmac delays that 30 Rock had a Matt Damon guest spot making fun of how bad it was. Legislation corrected this, but more importantly the THREAT of legislation fixed this. Adapting to a whole new set of rules has massive costs even if in the long term it benefits the big guys.
The answer is Political - not mentioned, in all of this is the guy Pete Buttigieg is the man in charge of using the bully pulpit of his office to keep the bloodhounds of consumer captialism on something like a leash. Even with the authority he has, he has not done this.
So, why hand him - or Biden, or whatever horseshit Civil Aeronautics Board 2.0 they cook up - an ounce more of power?
Railroads blew up Palestine Ohio. Regulations to modernize train brakes, not enforced by this admin. Railroad Workers struck, not for pay but to have a sick day - Biden broke the strike even though the railroads could easily afford it. California shipping got so bad 100+ tankers were stuck in the harbor - California's long term plan is to ban a significant ammount of American trucks from operating in the state. The pattern shows that given more power, this admin would break the Pilot's union like a twig and then let local acedemic communists estabish a social credit score to see who gets to fly standing room only to keep things as green as possible.
The solution is political - Bush, Obama, and Trump managed to keep the situation well enough in hand that we could all live with it, given the prices. Current admin creates the 'crisis,' then the Free Press rewards the policy advisor who would hand them yet another Consumer Board that will probably not fix the price or treatment problem, but hand yet another tool to the strike breakers, price fixers, and the tech $ that will create an algorithm to help us find the only flight we could afford. Even the Atlantic wouldn't put this guy on.
Hi OTG. While I agree with the thrust of your post, the catastrophic disruptions are far more frequent than once a century. In the last quarter of a century we’ve had 9/11, SARS, the financial crisis, an Icelandic volcano and of course COVID. All were hugely costly to the travel industry. It does appear to me that the only way forward is a highly regulated but essentially free market approach. Not an easy thing for an unreconstructed Randian to say but there you go.
If they gave away that much in the excerpt, no one would read the book. Let me know if the book is lacking as well.
As a former Air Traffic Controller I can leak stories that would curl your toes. Suffice to say, I don't fly. For example, does any one believe that weather this year is any worse than other years? If you do, I have an EV SR71 to sell to you.
My brother spent his career working on planes and later helicopters. He won't fly either.
Interesting, isn't it, that airline accidents per passenger mile remain low.
Unless your the one that did not make it. I am descended from.flight folks. Including the ones to space so I believe in air travel. But you have to be pretty naive to not see potential problems in the near future.
I guess you could say the same about climate change. Someday. Someday.
So I assume you don't drive, as drivers kill over 40,000 people every single year on our roads. You'd have to be seriously naive to not realize the factual and deadly truths about automobile travel.
You have to be seriously naive to engage in whataboutism. But on the topic of air travel, did you here about the mid-flight engine failure on the Southwest flight this week?
Just in case you missed this.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/scare-alaska-airlines-flight-1282-153245989.html
I wondered how the Blackbirds stayed so quiet.
The fact remains, that air travel remains far safer than automobile travel, which kills over 40,000 people every single year in the U.S.
The most dangerous part of flying is the drive to the airport.
I just found an old ad from American quoting a $178 round trip ticket from LA to NY in 1977. And i just googled a price today and the first price that came up was $228. Median hosehold income in 1977 was $12,000 and its $68,000 today. So on a realtive basis one would spend 1.5% of your income in 1977 and 0.3% today. So it's 4.4x cheaper today. Not sure I care enough about having a hot meal and few inches of legroom to pay 4 4x more.
Yeah but try buying a ticket from, say Cleveland to Nashville.
I haven't done the research, but I'll bet if you did it's stil much cheaper. Air travel is much more abundant today. And the real advantage is cheap travel. You can go anywhere for less than you could in 1977.
Depends on how long your flight is for meals and how tall you are for legroom. The seat shrinkage is my issue. If anyone is remotely overweight they are in your space. And they know it. I feel bad for them. And for me.
Well, on a relative basis you can buy a business ticket today for less than that coach ticket in 1977. Business is typically less than 4.4x more than coach today (typically 2 to 3 times coach). So apples to apples you are better off on cost (coach vs coach) or comfort (coach vs business) 1977 vs 2023.
What people want is business class comfort today for coach cost today. That intersection point never existed and doesn't exist today. But it's much closer today than 1977 (ie business class today is cheaper than coach in 1977 on a realtive basis)
True. About the desire for coach versus upgraded class anyway. And I am not that person. But 2023 coach is different than 1977 coach. So even the coach comparison is not apples to apples.
So compare today's business to yesterday's coach. Lower price and more comfort. Anyway you look at it the economics are better today. However, by drastically lowering the price we have expanded the number of people of flying, which in general is likely a very big positive for society. But more people increases the chances of absolute numbers of bad behavior. And with the instant media capture of those events we all become aware of the bad behavior.
I'm not sure of an economic way to solve that other than making the penalty for bad behavior very high.
I think yesterday's coach was more akin to today's business. Like everything (cell phones, electric cars, etc.) I guess when air travel was new people questioned the need so it was heavily marketed as glamorous. Which it was. People dressed to fly. You got cocktails and proper meals. Flight attendants were gracious. It was like being at a luxury hotel. But as it became accepted, then routine it lost the glamour. That is inevitable. But I think the airlines do themselves a disservice when they reduce themselves to nothing more than flying busses. That is just me. I don't fly that way. Well maybe in a very short flight. But I know you get what you pay for. So just set my fee. Give me what I pay for. And call it good. I think what you are trying to say with more people flying of course the incident of bad behavior increases because that's the way the trash acts. I do not agree with that. Pre-covid you had the occasional drunk and it was not class of seat specific. Covid stressed everybody. The airlines threw their staffs under the bus and some of them acted out. Some of them were already pretty full of themselves over TSA authority. Now I have been on several flights where they are downright nasty. Not to me personally, just in general. I take note. I have a three strike rule. United and SWA are both on my shite list. And I receive emails daily from SWA soliciting my business.
Likely all true but unfortunately COVID stress is beyond regulation :-)
Oh I forgot, intelligent people who have been in transportation, especially flying, have been the Sec. of Trans. and they still have tough challenges. And petey's bona fides? He's gay and takes time off while the transportation system is in crisis to welcome his newborn. He should be a great dad. In fact, he should resign from Sec. of Trans. to be a full time dad. That had to be the best 3 months of a well run Trans Dept under joe's administration. I use to think Cheney and Rumsfeld where the most corrupt and worse politicians ever. joe's administration makes them look like Einstein with with an IQ of 1000%. Yes I know it doesn't go that high. Unless you are being compared to one of joe's cabinet members.
Very roughly, for the average price of a ticket in 1980, you can buy a first class ticket today. If you want 1980’s service, legroom, free bags, etc., you can buy it. Most people don’t.
It's not unnatural to want to get first-rate service for bargain prices, but it's not realistic. The safety record of our airline industry is miraculous -- tens of millions of people hurtling through space, eight miles above the ground, at nine miles a minute, and year after year without a fatality or significant injury. But luxury like that photo at the top of the article just isn't going to come with a $39 ticket.
Regulation is appropriate for variables that might make flying more attractive, such as seat and leg room and maximum time sitting on a runway.
Limiting taxiway delays (no one sits on a runway) to some reasonable maximum, perhaps. But regulating legroom? There are people who can only afford to fly when it is cheap, and cheap tickets means seats closer together. Airline jets are expensive to buy ($90 million and up), expensive to maintain, expensive to operate, and the pilots, flight attendants and mechanics all need to be paid. More legroom can be had, but not for a bargain-basement ticket price; mandate lots of comfy legroom and many people won't be able to afford to fly at all. Mandate luxurious service and cheap prices and the airlines will go out of business.
No body said it is not still available for a price. But you avoid the shrinkage issue. Which IMO is real. I have seen schematics for people to be stacked.
I worked in airline marketing during deregulation and flew a lot for business. Flying during regulation was infinitely better because, as many commenters say, there weren’t as many people flying.
The writer isn’t proposing that we go back to a time when few people could afford to fly to improve the flying experience. He’s proposing that we apply what we learned during regulation to support sustainable airline businesses instead of reacting to crises and spending trillions and still end up with hundreds of bankruptcies. For example, I suspect his book will share what was learned during regulation about balancing profitable long haul routes with less profitable short haul routes. If running an airline were less volatile, they could focus on making flying experiences better and compete based on value instead of cheap pricing. But you have to buy the book to find out.
I say that’s smart.
1) Why should he give away what he knows for free?
2) Applying learning from the past to make things better is so much smarter than copying the past (without a clue about what worked or what didn’t) because the numbers scale, when that is basically because the population is bigger and outsourcing makes a commodity offering cheaper.
3) Making something worth paying more for creates value for customers, employees, business partners, the cities served, etc - which is why the business can be resilient during a crisis instead of requiring government bailout.
It is so refreshing to hear that the next generation is more interested in making things better than moving fast to break things. Yeah!
I won't claim the airlines are necessarily well-run businesses. They suffer from the same tendency to short term thinking that all publicly traded companies do. But they are highly competitive, and that means they are exquisitely sensitive to price/demand signals. So we, the flying public, wind up getting exactly what we care most about: the cheapest possible ticket. And since they can lower the cost of providing their service by reducing amenities and squeezing more people into the plane, that's exactly what they have done.
It's a little dishonest to pine for the regulated pre-1978 era with only a passing hint at the fact that air travel was so expensive that ordinary Americans couldn't afford it. Hence, the term "jet set." And I don't see how the pre-1978 regime would have handled COVID any better.
That jet set thing was a marketing strategy. People did not fly because it was , relatively speaking, new. It had to be sold. And boy has it been.
The consensus, and there's tons of evidence for this, is that prices fell significantly as a direct consequence of deregulation, and the number of passengers skyrocketed as a result, not because they had better advertising.
https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/AirlineDeregulation.html
"Airfares, when adjusted for inflation, have fallen 25 percent since 1991, and, according to Clifford Winston and Steven Morrison of the Brookings Institution, are 22 percent lower than they would have been had regulation continued (Morrison and Winston 2000). Since passenger deregulation in 1978, airline prices have fallen 44.9 percent in real terms according to the Air Transport Association. Robert Crandall and Jerry Ellig (1997) estimated that when figures are adjusted for changes in quality and amenities, passengers save $19.4 billion dollars per year from airline deregulation. These savings have been passed on to 80 percent of passengers accounting for 85 percent of passenger miles. The real benefits of airline deregulation are being felt today as never before, with LCCs increasingly gaining market share."
Ugh. None of that is responsive to anything I said and I am not really interested in a debate about this. The commenter I replied to said air travel was no longer viewed as the luxury it once was. To which I responded that air travel was novel (which places the time frame before the minutiae you supplied and as such well before regulation). In order to attract business air travel was marketed as luxurious and sold that way, which is likewise true. I, having lived through most of the time frame at issue, understand well both inflation and adjustment therefor. I actually think the adjustment figures are low. But here is why blind adherence to numbers is risky: sure flights are cheaper, both in terms of pricing and quality. Some of that is scaling. A lot of it is shrinkage, both in terms of space alloted and service provided. They do not even clean between flights anymore. The last two Southwest flights I was on (and they were the last ones for me period) the flight attendants instructed the passengers to clean-up before deplaning and they were not even nice about it. Southwest blew it with that Christmas 2022 fiasco. It pi$$ed me off (and I was only slightly inconvenienced) so I read up. Southwest is all about the shareholders and executive compensation. It cares not about the planes (even maintenance), the modern equipmemt needed to schedule flights and crews, the crews, or the amenities, much less the passengers. Gate personnel at the Nashville Airport called the cops on passengers stranded there and trying to get information. And before you chime in that they could get info online - No.They.Could.Not. A lot of it is overselling flights (to the point where just because you have a ticket is not assurance you will be accepted on the flight). A lot of it is inept federal bureaucracy. FWIW although I am very dubious of federal involvement in anything, I do believe in the instance of domestic and international air travel it is justified. But I need legitimate, well-reasoned regulation by a consortium of members of the regulated industry , consumers thereof, and bona fide experts schooled in the technology. None of which I'd provided by Mayor Pete from Indy. When he is in the office. I also think regulation of social media, you know, the self-proclaimed Town Square, is likewise required.
Just a simple mistake I'm sure, but you actually replied to me. Moving on.
Both times actually. In the first one I just opined as to how the thought was implanted that flying was luxurious to start with. In the second one I pointed out that your link laden reply was not responsive to what I said and then critiqued your link-supported position. I stand by both comments.
The price/comfort “problem “ is a supply and demand issue. Plane manufacturing has not kept up with plane demand for decades. Take a look at Boeing and Airbus 10 year backlogs. Airlines have the leverage to charge a lot for an uncomfortable product because planes are full and there’s nowhere else to turn. It’s that simple and it’s not going to change. Government intervention will just make it worse.
A misleading headline. The article says next to nothing about “what to do about it.” Perhaps there is more in the book than just “reflect more carefully” on the past.
Toldeo is 45 minutes from Detroit's airport, which is a major hub. One could argue that the absence of flights to Toldeo shows the effectiveness of deregulation rather than the problems with it.
I can't believe this article didn't have one mention of the dreadful and intrusive post-9/11 "security" procedures. Also, part of the employee shortage is due to vaccine mandates, also not mentioned.
If I had known we were going to skip the "How to Fix It" part mentioned in the headline, I wouldn't have bothered reading this article. I didn't need to waste eight minutes of my life to learn that flying sucks.
Something tells me his answer for how to fix it is to create a consumer board 2.0 of our betters to figure out how to fix it. (They will not fix it).
I just wasted my time reading this long article whose subtitle proposes ways to fix the airline mess but in the end offers no solutions at all.
The biggest problem is the pilot shortage. In the USA, pilots have to accumulate 1,500 hours of flying time before they can take the ATP pilot test to start training as a first officer with an airline. That requires at least 250 hours of instruction to get your commercial license, followed by usually additional training to get a multi=engine license, plus a lot of poor-paying jobs to built the hours to qualify for the ATP exam. There simply are not enough people who can afford this.
In most of the world, airlines take pilots right out of training school at perhaps 250-300 hours, and then develop them. Despite the fewer hours, that is probably safer, because the trainees start very early on with training on the commercial airliners that they are ultimately going to fly as captain or first officer. In the USA, you end up spending time on several different types of planes and thus have to UNLEARN some habits in order to properly fly a commercial airliner. Flying a Cessna Caravan is very different from flying a Boeing 737.
It is considered impossible to change this in the USA because if they do, the news media will run scare stories about having inexperienced pilots on commercial jets, and no member of Congress would vote for it.
The irony is that our largely leftist media, which always wants us to be more like Europe, would be lobbying AGAINST the very model of pilot training that European airlines use.
And on top of that, US pilots have one major advantage. English is the language of commercial aviation, so in other countries, pilots have to master English in addition to their flying skills. American pilots don't have this problem.
In the past, weren't most airline pilots former US Military pilots? Another unintended consequence of our reduced military? I'm asking, I don't have the data. Thanks.
I don't know if most were, but yes, there is a reduced pool of military pilots to draw from these days.
I've noticed that, despite a long history of whining about how Europe is better, Leftists actually don't want to implement a lot of ideas that work well in Europe. European abortion laws and European school systems are just two additional examples of things the Left actually hates about Europe.
This is not much more than an advertisement for the author's book. For example there is zero discussion of what the solution to the problem is. I searched online and found this from a review: "Sitaraman’s solution is a return to government oversight, with regulation of prices and a licensing system to ensure that all cities receive service." OK. The FAA or someone is going to dictate prices? That has never worked. We could alternatively enforce existing laws on predatory pricing. When I fly from Washington, D.C. to California if I fly from Washington Dulles on United I pay a much higher price than if I fly out of Baltimore (a short drive away) where even United matches the low price offered by Southwest Airlines. When Southwest began flying out of Dulles, United lowered their price until SW left, and then raised their price back to the existing high levels. This is a clear violation of the Sherman anti-trust act, but our DoJ instead of investigating and prosecuting this sued Microsoft over their bundling of Windows with a web browser (remember the browser wars?). We need to open our skies to real competition! Another approach would be to allow foreign airlines to fly between the east and west coasts. We might even get lie flat seats that are offered internationally!