The 34-year-old airline novice who thinks he's Richard Branson

It flew from LCY to JFK with a stop at Shannon in Ireland for quick refuelling and US Immigration preclearance (so you landed in NY like it was a domestic flight). It was an Airbus A318 in a 32 (if I remember correctly) all business class configuration.

I can book my trip, select my seat (none of the trying to check in 23h59m59s998ms ahead, only to find you got A12 anyway and then 42 people had some reason to have priority boarding including the in-flight miracles where someone needs a wheelchair to board early, but walks off on their own), and if there are irregular ops challenges, Delta likely has 2-5 other similar flights in their network.

We fly SWA sometimes for personal travel and I can say “it’s better than Spirit, but I prefer Delta.” (We fly Delta even when it’s our own money, unless SWA has a non-stop and Delta doesn’t.)

What I'd like to see is an airline with: * Single-class seating * No frequent flyer programme.

First and business class create weird perverse incentives: they'd rather leave seats empty most of the time in the hope they'll get a few business travelers not spending their own money, or people who managed to grind their way to Triple Oganesson status and managed to drag an upgrade out of the system. The rest of the time, it's just an obnoxious reminder that they could be providing a better experience, but you're not paying them enough to get it.

Frequent flyer programmes will never make sense for a large section of passengers. So again, it's just another thing to hassle customers with, either as extra steps in checkout, or a place to say "well, if you spent enough money with us every year, we'd let you skip to the front of a queue."

I think the most flights I've taken in a year was four return trips, to two different destinations, using three different airlines. There's no way I could generate enough points to earn meaningful status or "free" travel in a practical timeframe, and even if I could, it's not going to change the fact that many city pairs have limited service choices. I'm not sure there are enough points you can give me to justify injecting a 50% price premium, flight change and four hour layover into a trip that's three and a half hours if I go direct via $other_airline.

The best I could do is instead intentionally select a rewards credit card programme, and attempt to divert spending to that to attempt to rack up points. If I'm going to use a rewards card, I'll use one that reimburses me in actual money, instead of a corporate scrip subject to surprise devaluation or blackouts. Theoretically if I line everything up just right, I could get 42% back in the form of Air Koryo Fun Points, but only if I use the card on months with no "R" to buy UberEats delivery of pork rinds. By comparison, 1.5-2% of hassle-free American Dollars across any purchases feels like less of a cryptic puzzle made by a DM who spends too much time in Excel, and more of an actual incentive.