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Comment by leoedin | Hacker News Reader

When comparing "flying then" to "flying now", you need to look at the real cost of the flights. Yes, the experience in economy class has got worse, but the cost of the ticket has also significantly dropped. In 2021 dollars, the cost of a round trip air fare has basically halved since 1979. You could buy a business class ticket now for a comparable price to economy back then.

https://www.airlines.org/dataset/annual-round-trip-fares-and...

https://www.travelandleisure.com/airlines-airports/history-o...

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> You could buy a business class ticket now for a comparable price to economy back then.

And if you buy business class, you end up with a lie flat seat that will likely be better than the economy seat you could buy at the time. In addition, the aircrafts now are more comfortable with much less noise and higher cabin pressures. In addition, flying is much safer now than it was in the 1960s.

This is an article about US airline domestic flights, so none of that is in business class.

It is in premium transcontinental business class.

> round trip air fare has basically halved since 1979

I don't think that number will hold up if you include square feet of personal space and lbs of luggage that might need extra fees.

The airlines.org figures includes a column with bags and fees. More or less halved in real terms since 1990.

You might have lost an inch or two of legroom. Then again, you might not because they made the seats skinnier...

Ye well I agree that it has become cheaper to fly. I just don't think it is a 1:1 between the ticket price tag change and the value for me change.

Or factor in the loss of purchasing power, along with the shrinkflation.

I love when people adjust for inflation in these debates but don't factor in purchasing power of the dollar comparison.

The ticket price is more expensive now, than 1979.

Ye there should be a 10 column table with:

Gallons of milk in my grocery store.

Lbs of potatoes of X species.

Feet of 2 by 4s to X spec.

sq inch of flat in Dallas.

Hours worked for a white collar clerk.

Etc. "Inflation adjusted" dollars are not quality adjusted really.

In the same way a economy class ticket is a worse experience than in the 90s, e.g. a chicken is a worse chicken too.

That's the point, though - what you get has diminished, but the trade is that you pay substantially less. If you want more, you can still pay for premium economy or business. It's better to enable people with less money to fly, while still letting people get a better experience if they want to spend more.

Not to mention order of magnitude reduction of the amount of fresh air per passenger allowed to enter the cabin. Not to mention that the flight attendants used to be registered nurses; now they might not even know how to work the oxygen bottles.

This is a case where I wish society didn’t optimize for the lowest price and instead made it acceptable to pay more to make the default option more appealing. Yes, you can always pay for business class, but it’s framed as an upgrade, not the baseline standard.

Yes, but... today, if you don't need more than carry-on luggage and are ok with not getting anything to eat during the flight, you are able to afford flying, let's say, from Munich to Barcelona for a weekend, which you maybe wouldn't have been able to do when "paying more for a more appealing default option". Of course it's debatable if encouraging such flights is good for the environment, but purely from the perspective of having more travel options, I would say it's a win...

It's my understanding that most of these cheap flights are heavily subsidized to begin with.

But my point was more that just as we have certain expectations for other things, it would be nice if we had the same for air travel – and not just resign ourselves to "the absolute lowest price possible" as the defining characteristic.

If you mean "subsidized" because the airlines don't have to pay the kind of taxes on jet fuel that users of road (or rail) vehicles have to pay on gas, or that they only have to pay airport taxes, but can use the airways free of charge, then yes. But no-frills airlines like Ryanair are not in the charity business, so you can bet that their price calculation is economically sound on the whole.

Some countries (like the UK) even have additional taxes on flights that are not the lowest class available. I'm not sure if it is to discourage taking more comfortable travel options or just to scalp people with money.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Passenger_Duty

Except that means that people who fall below the baseline are just cut out. A large swath of the country in the 1950s simply couldn’t fly anywhere.

I am waiting for the day going to the toilet during flight and be faced with a contactless payment terminal to open the door.

Ryanair did it >10 years ago, coin slot not contact payment terminal however.

They didn't actually do it. The Ryanair CEO, Michael O'Leary, has a well-practiced approach of making outlandish claims about Ryanair's thrifty innovations that echo around the internet; discount publicity. About the same time he claimed that a standing-only section would be introduced for £1 tickets. Of course this also didn't happen.

Not in the flights I regularly take.

That would run into the FAA; there are a number of things that happen on flights that are mandated by the FAA, I suspect restrooms (and the drinks) are some of them for health reasons.

After traveling through Europe and seeing the amount of "pay per use" bathrooms, I am torn.

On one hand, there are many more public washrooms than in North America, and they are generally much cleaner. On the other hand, paying to basically be a human being feels wrong and I refused to use them.

I've used the toilet on a plane maybe 2 times in my life, and I've fly quite a bit, so this probably wouldn't impact me much at all.

Usually you will only find those in germanic culture countries, I never got why. I mean the ones inside services like coffees, restaurants,....

There are the single purpose ones in the middle of nowhere or train stations, where payment is an attempt against vandalism.

Everywhere else they tend to be free, and contrary to being on a plane, one can search for an alternative.

> In 2021 dollars, the cost of a round trip air fare has basically halved since 1979. You could buy a business class ticket now for a comparable price to economy back then.

Business class is generally much more than double economy class right now.

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