Or maybe the market has spoken. Similar to how people complain about lack of legroom but proceed to book with airlines that have less legroom because it's cheaper, they're happy to fly on 1967 design planes to save a buck.
When you're booking a plane ticket, you don't have much information about the legroom amount. Maybe you can tell somewhat from the airline, but most airlines have a variety of different planes, and I don't know how to use that information to determine legroom.
Google flights shows it eg. "Below average legroom (29 in)"
For many trips, there are no reasonable alternatives to air travel. If you live in New York and really want to treat your kids to a trip to Disney World in Florida, you can drive, and can take a train/bus, but you'll be burning a significant amount of your precious time off work on travel.
The interesting thing is that I don't believe air travel is all that much cheaper now than it was in, say, 2010, when things were quite a bit more comfortable. Maybe not as comfortable as pre-deregulation, but certainly better than today, with more comfortable seats and more leg room.
Has it become much more costly to run an airline over the past decade? Maybe? I don't know. But if not, this doesn't seem to be "the market", at least not in the way a healthy market, with ample competition, would behave.
Actually according to the BLS since Jan 2010, the CPI has went up 42% whereas airline fares have dropped 7.5%. That means adjusted for inflation airline fares have actually dropped 35%. I would say that arguably counts as "that much cheaper". Whether that's worth the decrease in legroom (unknown amount of inches) is another matter.
> Has it become much more costly to run an airline over the past decade? Maybe? I don't know. But if not, this doesn't seem to be "the market", at least not in the way a healthy market, with ample competition, would behave.
I think there's just a lot more competition among airliners post airline deregulation. The costs for most airliners is fixed (pilots, crew, aircraft, fuel, airport fees, A&Ps, etc) and so you're competing on small things like aircraft seat configuration, trim, routes, and prices.
10 years ago I would fly a lot of out of the airport in Ithaca which had good connections to hubs at PHL, DTW and IAD which could get you anywhere.
Today the ITH airport looks close to dead, the only flights are to NYC, one to EWR where I've had to exit and then re-enter security every time I've made a connection there. It's almost unthinkable that I'd take the plane to NYC if I was actually going to NYC because bus service is highly competitive to to the city. Although there are no longer national carriers like Greyhound and Shortline (going to Detroit is hard now) but for the point-to-point route there are numerous buses at different price points some of which are budget like the Chinatown bus and others are premium like the bus that stops at the Cornell Club.
I can find something positive in losing our local airport in that SYR has greatly expanded and now has numerous low-cost and ultra-low cost carriers. For once I can get on a plane and know absolutely it won't be a 737. I can fly Jetblue to LA for less than it ever cost on Delta.
Yet I can point to many signs that the industry has not been thinking clearly or that the choices it has been offering people are not real. I'd point as exhibit #1 the experience you'll have boarding a plane on American Airlines at their hub at PHL where they'll spend 20 minutes reading from a very long and complicated list of who is allowed to board in the plane under what order under whatever circumstances. Turns out there is a definite hierarchy for all the credit cards you might have with American Airlines or with some airline that got bought by American Airliners not to mention many different levels you can be in the frequent flier program, many kinds of tickets, etc.
We know if they just boarded the plane outside in we would all be on our way a few minutes earlier and it would not demand so much of the staff boarding us and they might have fewer cases of staff rage quitting because they are being abused like this, etc. But instead it's an important opportunity to rub the average traveller's nose in shit, prove how little worth they have compared to other people's in the airline's eyes, etc.
Before 2008, airlines offered just economy and first class on domestic routes, refusing to sell you anything a little bit more expensive that would be just a little bit better because they didn't want to create competition for first class. The proliferation of Economy+ and other service tiers after the financial crisis was actually a sign of sanity, of the industry getting more flexible. Still the major airlines form a cartel where they won't compete for better service in economy because they couldn't afford to give up a single first class flyer to a more humane coach.