American consumers routinely choose lower-priced tickets over those on more-comfortable airlines. And when ticket prices go down, Americans fly more.
The real price of a ticket has fallen consistently since at least the 1980s [1]. Full-fare (i.e. first-class refundable) ticket prices today remain around where any ticket price was a few decades ago.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/files/2012/1...
I guess care was taken to adjust for shorter (and hence cheaper) flights? If short flight started to become more common, I would expect the average price to fall, even if the ”actual" price stayed constant.
I guess they did, but not completely clear from the graph.
The graph shows per-mile costs of flying [1].
If we measure same-route costs, we find "in the 50s, a flight from Chicago to Phoenix could cost $138 round-trip — that’s $1,168 when adjusted for" 2014 prices [2]. A quick Kayak search shows that route now flies for as little at $65 on Frontier or about $120 on e.g. United. That's a 95% price reduction at the lowest tier.
(A P-class full-fare ticket on Delta is about $500. Given $138 in 1955 bought as much as $1,265 today [3], that's still a 60% real price reduction.)
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/02/how-air...
[2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/15/air-travel-1950s_n_...
er, it certainly is cheaper than the 80s, but not sure what you mean by consistently there. Look at that graph post 2002.