Is air travel getting worse?
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The weirdest part is how subjective the question is. It's like saying, is life getting worse? It turns out there's more than a few ways of looking at that. Air travel is cheap and widely available, despite coming out of a global pandemic, not to mention the global recession before that, among other minor blips. Oh, but you were delayed in getting in your magic metal tube that hurtles through the sky at hundreds of miles an hour, letting you sip beer and watch movies in your PJs while traveling thousands of miles in a few hours, arriving safer than any other form of transportation? Man, that's terrible.
Happily my last few flights I have used points to upgrade to sit in the front of the plane, which alleviates the space problem, but just having to spend more time hanging around in the airport because of added security is hard for me to deal with.
Objectively and societally it may be better that more people have access to something, but by definition more people doing something makes it a shittier experience. No metrics or other dimensions necessary.
Money - the very high cost of any air travel prior to deregulation - used to somewhat alleviate both issues. The airlines had incentive to compete on service quality rather than chase the maximum number of seats they could pack on a plane. And anyone paying that much to fly had a reputational incentive to behave in a civilized way.
Flying private for the same amount of inflation-adjusted money as first class cost in the 1960s is a poor analogue, because it inherently leaves out the social dynamic that caused people to, e.g., wear their best clothes and don their best manners to board an airplane. There is no analogue, because first class now is not much better than what coach was back then. In other words, public air travel as it is now is a product that did not exist in the 1960s, geared to a consumer who didn't exist. And the enshittification is inevitable when the goal is maximum occupancy.
If there were an airline with double the legroom in coach for double the price of coach on other airlines, I'd fly it exclusively. No one offers that. It's a barbell with steerage at one end and a very diminished first class experience for 5x the price at the other.
In my experience for example, people on flights outside of the US tend to be far more polite, amicable, and respectful than one experiences on US flights, even though flights are still widely accessible in that region too, to my knowledge. Perhaps part of that is a side effect of reasonable train availability as well and distribution resulting from that (another great public utility we lack in the US because public good is bad or something)
This doesn't seem to be true at all in my experience. Nasty behavior or punches in planes in India is increasingly common. And it will get worse as more and more people travel by plane again due to "cheap tickets".
And cheap ticket price creates same incentive as cheap gas price. If its so cheap why not just travel more. One can argue "no one is forced to fly in plane" but living in society has taught me otherwise.
I feel one key social dynamic is travel, tourism, exploring the world is relentlessly promoted as unalloyed good. Cities all over are falling over each other as great place to "explore" and "experience" much more than being good place to live, work or raise family.
If I see through this promotion I am the curmudgeon who doesn't love the joys of travel.
Even a villain is the hero in their own story.
For the vast majority of folks who are or would be a nuisance in flight, I'm pretty sure:
* If they hear about stories where folks got punished for being obnoxious, they'd think "I would never be that obnoxious - that is not meant for people like me". In other words, they'be oblivious to their own predilections.
* If they are placed in a situation where their instincts would lead them to being obnoxious, they.. will be obnoxious. Even if they 'know' what the consequence are. There are a few reasons for that:
* It's a crime of passion; they can't help themselves. That's the general problem with trying to use rationality to tamper down crime: Most crimes are fundamentally not rational. You don't decide that it is in your best interest to murder someone (outside of an infinitesemal % of the population that are high functioning total psychopaths). No, you do so in the heat of the moment. At which point "Rational brain telling the id to cut it the fuck out because you might be ejected from the plane" is obviously going to have absolutely no tempering effect whatsoever.
* They honestly think it doesn't apply to them. Usually because 'yes of course obnoxious behaviour should be punished by ejecting the obnoxian from the plane. But I'm not obnoxious, you don't understand! That kid is crying and driving me nuts, I had a bad night's sleep, and I have an important meeting right out of the plane so I need my rest so I have to yell at that mom to shut their kid up, see, my intentions are good!'
Ref: Bit of a stretch, but: Similar (in culture, size, average wage, etc) locations with wildly different takes on how important it is to punish crime in order to serve as a 'warning' / to disincentivise crime by making clear that it will be heavily punished. The best place in my experience to look for this is the US where it appears to be culturally in vogue to act as some sort of wild west sheriff trope. The results? Not one iota of difference in crime rates. Or, if anything, the places that punish it more have _more_ crime, not less. And, of course, a million-and-one psych papers.
If you want to make flight less of a nuisance, the rest of this thread has the right idea I think: Given that it's so ubiquitously available and intentionally designed in that way, it's inevitable that the experience sucks. If you want the experience to be less bad, it inherently comes with a reduction in accessibility.
And on top of that, 'travel stress' is real and not something the airline industry can easily tackle. Try to imagine that travel just stresses you out. That it just does. For those who don't suffer from travel stress this can be hard to do. Maybe you have a light fear of heights; channel that. It's easy to see how the experience just kinda sucks if half the people trying to enjoy the view from some high vantage point are lightly freaking out, and they kinda have to be there for other reasons.
Even without any of the reasons you mentioned I shouldn’t have to yell at that mom to shut their kid up, the flight attendant should.
I’d pay 50% more for any flight where it’s the flight attendant’s job to make people and their kids shut the hell up.
Wouldn’t you?
Screaming children test my patience too, but I’m really not sure screaming adults do much to resolve that. It’s always seemed to me that grace is the better part of maturity.
Sometimes you can get earplugs if you ask nicely.
It's easy to see when a mother is actively soothing her baby or just letting it scream as much as it wants.
It's not immature for me to expect her to control her screaming child or otherwise not bring it on an airplane.
Let them be for a while at home.
I’m a member of human society too. Me and 80% of the people on the plane can’t stand the selfishness but have the self-control not to say anything, because it’ll do no good anyway.
But if there were an airline that charged double for rejecting kids under the “shut up” age, I’d pay double for my seat and I bet I’m not alone.
neither can I. But most of the people also understand that when a kid is crying, it is not out of parents' selfishness but rather helplessness.
> But if there were an airline that charged double for rejecting kids under the “shut up” age, I’d pay double for my seat and I bet I’m not alone.
The fact that no parent wants their child to keep crying is something that eludes you means you have very little social skills and you are amongst a tiny minority. If any airline ever proposes something like that, the backlash will be swift and massive.
EDIT: aha found this through your comment history: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38205960
"Children irritate me and I want to block them out to the maximum degree that I am able" - I'll pray for you.
This is true. But it's not a condemnation of my position: if anything, it supports my level of frustration with the status quo.
Children are necessary and must be loved. At the same time, they (usually) don't need to be on airplanes if they can't be stopped from wailing for 9 straight hours (not an exaggeration- that's what happened on my Frankfurt flight).
There are medical flights and dying relatives and migrations and so on that are unavoidable. I was the wailing child on such a flight once, the pressure killing my ears. But that flight was entirely unavoidable.
And here's what you don't seem to get: people like me accept all of it if the parent is making any effort to stop it or console/distract the child, which is what my parents spent the flight doing.
Instead, we look at the parent sitting on their phone with earphones in while the kid is wailing next to them and curse society for normalizing this.
However, people want to pay less and less, while airlines earn more and more. Competition is limited and I don't see how flight comfort can improve for the average passenger.
Or is it we're scared of getting shot or punched in the face, given how much we've vilified law and order as inherently unjust and skewed, and therefore to be reimagined. And thus we grit our teeth in 'tolerance' which is a virtue of the young.
Flexible seat back pockets are easy for people to stuff all kinds of trash in, so that's just one more task for the crew. Inflexible slots are harder to put trash in, and harder for passengers to notice there's trash in.
Just an offer, I don't actually know the airlines' historical cleaning crew requirement number trends.
Flying out of Cyprus was a good example, they have some crazy system where you have to print off a bit of paper at a kiosk to...well I really don't know what it did to be honest, verified your passport?
[1] https://www.homedepot.com/p/HDX-N95-Disposable-Respirator-3-... [2] https://www.homedepot.com/p/3M-OV-AG-P100-Professional-Multi...
Also when someone farts it’s the particles that smell bad, not the air itself
I didn't expect such a strenuous defense of people who fart like cows on an airplane and make other people's lives significantly worse.
And for some people it can just start happening out of the blue in the wrong moment.
After this attempt at gaslighting (how dare you complain about someone who farts every 15 minutes, out of the blue, during a 6-hour flight, spreading a nauseating smell throughout the plane and making the flying experience miserable for dozens, if not hundreds, of other passengers), I wonder if the times I held back from farting, I was tapping into some latent superpowers I didn't know I had. Or, by doing so, I was putting my health and the safety of my organs at risk, and it was only by some lucky coincidence that I didn't end up in the emergency room.
There's always a convenient rationalization for bad behavior. People screaming on a plane? Maybe they got fired, were having a nervous breakdown, and holding back the screams would have landed them in the hospital. People singing at the top of their lungs during a flight? Maybe it's their way of coping with the stress of a breakup. Or maybe they're just annoying people who were never taught how to behave in public.
A few months ago, I was in a bar with a date and heard a noise, as if someone had farted loudly. I thought, “How is that possible?”, and looked at the woman next to us who was leaning on a nearby table. While I was mentally filing the noise away as the loud movement of a chair, the nauseating smell that reached my nostrils made me realize that my benevolent interpretation was wrong and that the woman had indeed farted loudly in a bar during happy--but not for us--hour.
There are many people who lack good manners. And the advice to “protect yourself at all times” should be limited to the boxing ring, where people are willingly punching each other, and not to airplanes.
You could get all in your head, getting angry at the person who farted, why they farted, why they shouldn't have, how could they, how dare they, etc. But that's not reducing the discomfort. It's just adding anger, which creates stress, which doesn't feel good. You have the power to use tools or thoughts to control your own psychic discomfort. Identify the discomfort, cope with it, let it pass. This enables you to turn an otherwise miserable trip into a temporary inconvenience, less stress, and generally happier life.
When people say, “If it won't bother you in five years, why should it bother you now?”, what comes to mind is that if someone slapped you in the face during your morning walk, in 20 minutes the pain would pass and what would remain is this lingering experience in your mind of being disrespected, humiliated, treated like a fool by another human being. Nothing much, after all. You can identify the discomfort, cope with it and let it pass. In 5 years, it would be nothing but a distant memory. It is just a slap, who cares? People do boxing Muay Thai and MMA and get punched, slapped, and kicked at any training session. How can you be bothered by somebody slapping you during your morning walk? Next time, you can bring your headgear if you don't want to feel pain for those 20 minutes. Not much of a hassle.
Following your reasoning, if you see someone letting their dog defecate, I don't know, on your lawn every day at 7:30 in the morning, you should just let it go, who cares, all animals defecate and you shouldn't bother. It would be like having a superpower that would leave you with a more peaceful and happy life, maybe with a collection of excrement on your lawn or maybe with you, or me, or anybody else kneeling to pick up that feces a few minutes after the fact. It could be a good motivation to exercise and lubricate one's joints, after all.
It is a great way of thinking, but I am still among those who do not like to get slapped during my morning walk and don't appreciate dogs defecating on my lawn. Maybe I am old-fashioned.
The dog shit maybe you'll do something about, and maybe you'll call the cops over the slap, but I don't see how you're going to stop the farting. Maybe ask for another seat, or trade with someone. Or bring a mask on board. Or, barring that, maybe try to use your mind to diffuse the uncomfortable feeling. But otherwise you are just sitting in your own discomfort, feeling miserable. That's the point i'm making. You don't have to be miserable.
I don't share your passive acceptance of being treated like a fool by other people. There is not a single normal person in the world saying, "You know what, what we need now is somebody farting here". As the British leader said: "Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never - in nothing, great or small, large or petty".
Real change happens when people refuse to accept the erosion of their freedom and stand up against the abuses of others. Sometimes it is possible; other times, such as when it is not possible to identify the abuser, it is not, and we must carry on, but I hold close to my heart my right to indignation.
As I wrote before, many parallels can be drawn; it is not just about somebody gassing the other passengers on a plane. For example, using Bluetooth speakers in public spaces.
I recall that at work, I had a colleague who would put their bare feet on the desk, next to another colleague's. I told the affected colleague, who seemed reluctant to take a stand: "You tell them to put their feet down, get the respect you deserve". In the end, according to your Zen way of life, who cares? What are you gonna do, cut their feet? But I don't think I was wrong.
I'm old enough to remember when passengers lit up once the No Smoking sign went off.[0] Whatever you may think about whether that's as rude as passing gas, it was much more socially acceptable (and probably masked a lot of farts).
So, a friend's father who was a career mechanic for American Airlines once told me that when smoking was banned on planes, the airline found they could drastically reduce the amount of bleed air they introduced to the cabin, thus reducing aerodynamic drag and increasing fuel efficiency. I don't remember by how much he said the fresh air was reduced, but it was something like an order of magnitude. Whereas in the smoking days, the cabin air was completely refreshed every 30 seconds or something, now it's like every five minutes.
The result being more germs and viruses floating around the cabin and, presumably, more recycled farts.
Maybe one of the airline folks on HN can confirm this, and also whether it's changed at all since Covid.
[0] Side note: On a recent flight, I had a bet with my companion about the No Smoking sign. She believed that it could not be turned off. I countered that there would be no reason to have an illuminated sign at all if it couldn't be turned off. Why waste the light bulbs? Just put a sticker there. Clearly they had a lit sign because some charter airline somewhere, or maybe a privately owned 737, might still allow people to smoke.[1] Anyway, we were sitting in the first row by the bulkhead, and a little while later the pilot came out for a coffee break. So I asked him to settle our bet. He said, "Watch the sign," and went into the cockpit. We watched it. Nothing happened. He came back out and asked, "Did it go off?" We said, "No." He grinned and said, "The switch is still there, but it's disconnected."
[1] I know the thing about the ashtrays in the lavatories being a safety measure, so that in case someone decides to smoke in violation of all common sense, at least they might not throw it in the toilet.
It used to be FAR more common to get onto airplanes that were partially or even nearly totally empty. The extreme increase in efficiency/total flights combined with privatization means that every tom dick and harry is now flying/being a shitty tourist. I would nationalize all airline industries and I would have done it yesterday primarily because tom and dick should not be flying!
Americans have too much money. Too many low quality Americans (i.e the kind who cause negative stereotypes of Americans abroad) are now traveling who should have stayed home permanently.
Gate keeping is good and the "let people enjoy things" crowd is responsible for why a lot of stuff is now declining in this world.
Tourism is only fun when it's being done in small amounts. The locals of the "tourist dependent localities" certainly agree (and are often willing to take significant economic pain for the benefits of reducing the tourist load). Why not give them what they want for once???
I'm not sure I've ever seen this as a pejorative for doing research to come up with sources for data before.
They say it's worse in terms of delays, cheaper, and safer. This all seems to be perfectly correct.
Rambling about for travel follows ...
I remember back in the 90s when a domestic flight was a major luxury for an upper middle class family. Now just about anyone with disposable income can afford it.
An economy ticket in the 90s was (roughly IIRC) equivalent to business class today in terms of service and first class in terms of price.
Yes, it's a lot cheaper. IMO if someone wants to experience 90s style travel they could upgrade to business or first class but there's a reason why most people don't.
Airlines have also gotten better at saving money on things that won't chase customers away. Delays are always a possibility so just having a better record on delays won't win many customers because they still need to manage the risk of delay. See also meals, seats, and every other thing people hate about air travel - there's always been unpleasant things about air travel, and making them a bit worse and a lot cheaper will win a lot more customers than it loses.
> At no time did they actually talk to somebody in the travel industry.
Ignoring what conclusions they landed on, I'd like to defend this approach.
For a controversial subject, first party expertise or second party direct testimonials will have less weight than actual data and tangible trends.
We're having exceptional access to data, and I personally wish more people would go look for a topic they care about, gather facts and expose their conclusion.
An example of it is Sarah Marshall's essays on Tonya Harding [0] with 0 access, only interviews, police reports and news papers of the time. IMHO it's not competiting with expert analysis or new reporting, and bring a different kind of insight to the table.
In 2008, airlines began charging for checked bags[1]. This was done both for the immediate revenue increase, and also to prod flyers into airline loyalty programs or airline credit cards to get a free checked bag. However, that caused a lot of casual fliers to go carryon-only. That, in turn, causes it to take longer to board/exit planes, leading to longer turn around times.
I've long contended that airlines should get rid of checked bag fees. And if they feel like they really want to be evil, switch the fees to carryons. That would decrease the number of carryons and decrease the turnaround time.
EDIT: From the article "Starting around 2008, Scheduled flight times began increasing even faster than actual ones" This has me convinced that the bag fees really torpedoed turnaround times.
[1] https://www.farecompare.com/travel-advice/airline-fees-bags-...
As for payments slowing down boarding: I expect that it does, but the price info I see online suggests that the carryon fees are punitive (more than checked baggage, and with a 100% surcharge for paying at the gate). In other words, the purpose of the fee is more about discouraging people from bringing a carryon in the first place than the revenue it generates.
Frontier doesn't seem to be shy about reminding customers about the gate pay surcharge, either.
> How would they charge for carryons though? Would they charge for say a bag of food you just bought?
Simple. Charge for the right to put a suitcase in the overhead bins. If it can fit under the seat in front of you, in the seat pocket, or if you can wear it, then no problem.
> Also they'd have to put in infrastructure for charging right at the gate
The flight attendants already have the ability to say "sorry, you need to check that" if the bins are full or if an item is too big, and then get the item where it needs to go. They already have the ability to charge your card with a handheld reader if you want to order special food items. I'm failing to see the obstacle here.
getting rid of the carry-on doesn't mean no personal item, it just means you aren't allowed any space in the overhead bin.
If I chose to not bring two items (or three, or four, as many passengers do because there is no enforcement of rules), I should get to place it in the overhead bins and not have to cramp my feet.
For that reason, I've never understood the obsession with loading the plane quickly.
Just yesterday I took a flight where they asked everyone to try to hurry up loading so they could get the plane off the ground sooner.
I'd love to see some hard data on this (I've tried to find it in the past, but there's so much fluff about this subject)!
https://southwest50.com/our-stories/a-turning-point-the-birt...
Still, 20 minute turns would be industry-leading.
Not sure if it would actually make an impact -you will still get blockages. Would need a queuing theorist to comment.
I know I'm not the industry's ideal customer-- taking solo tourist-class flights booked long in advance, once or twice a year, and not churning frequent flyer points, but that doesn't mean I want to be treated with contempt.
To be honest, that feels like an entire direction the travel sector needs to focus on. I'm paying hundreds of dollars to sit in your lowest-bid Metal Death Tube or stay in your Totally Not A Bedbug Sanctuary, stop treating me like a transient who walked into a Rodeo Drive boutique because I don't have Triple Ytterbium Status.
No thanks. I'll take a slower boarding with a traditional airline that doesn't make their passengers feel like a burden.
You really do need to pay for A boarding if you must sit together. Or game the system and claim you need to preboard.
https://www.wfaa.com/article/money/business/southwest-airlin...
Recently, certain airlines have announced that small bags must go under seats so there’s room in overhead storage for roller bags. There goes my leg room and any incentive to pack smaller with just one small backpack.
Now, I’m incentivized to bring the maximum size carry on so that I get overhead space and don’t have to shove smaller bags next to my feet.
More often than not, I get to stash it in the overhead bin. There's often space for something like 3-1/2 rollers in a bin, so I can squeeze my bag in. The option of putting it under my seat is something I save for strict necessity, but it's still preferable to gate-checking.
I also don't see it as "downtime". I can check mail, message friends, call friends, read news, listen to podcasts or audio books, or music, all from my phone while I wait.
My wife is just the opposite, and always checks a giant bag. I get so irritated waiting for her bags and so stressed getting to the airport on time for them to take it -- another advantage of carryon only is that you can show up to the airport just-in-time, and you have one less unpredictable line to wait in. Carryon only + clear means I can show up to the airport 10 minutes before doors close and walk on the plane & not have to worry about lines, carry on space, waiting for luggage, etc.
Due to airline status etc. I always have a free checked bag, but I never, ever use it.
Airline lost my bad, and took 5 days for it to arrive. Had no clothes, toiletries etc. to compound things there was then a hurricane and the shops were closed.
When you need to check-in a bag, that's a whole situation. When you turn up at the airport with a backpack and a boarding pass in your Apple Wallet, now that is a nice way to start a trip.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/267204880751
Basically a non-descript nylon bag with minimal accoutrements. I curse its lack of features (extra pockets, etc) on every trip, then it goes on the shelf until the next trip. It was on sale at the local sporting goods store when I was in high school. I recently bought a cheap waterproof cover for it, because I noticed that most of the advertised "waterproof" packs come with a cover.
I have a very lightweight, tiny day pack that I either roll up and stuff in the main pack, or carry on as my "personal item." That way, I can leave the big pack in my hotel room.
All the more reason to remove disincentives from checking bags.
Honeestly the biggest reason I avoid checking bags is reliability. After you experience having a suitcase completely lost by an airline, it's hard to trust the system again.
The FAA can force airlines to dedicate about 1.5X the amount of space per person that they do today, and all of these stupid problems disappear. Airlines could even get away with the skeleton crew of airline staff that they use today with the reduced amount of people who'd be paying more per seat.
But, because we have to let far too many people fly, and because the FAA doesn't stop private companies from violating human rights with their airplane seat designs, we have to deal with this lunancy where anyone 6 feet and above has to assume a struggle position for in some cases 20+ hours (i.e. flights to Singapore) in a fully packed metal coffin.
Same with seat width. The only issues there are when a minority of passengers are so large they take up your seat, they should be removed from the flight.
"Premium economy" and similar doesn't give meaningful legroom improvements and is generally a scam.
The only option for tall people (not overweight) is exit rows which are also the first seats taken or the few "extra legroom" seats usually in the front of economy by the bathrooms. These seats are also taken months in advance.
Americans are tall because we are fed well. Our tallness is partly why we are so dominant during wartime. The world bends to our will, not the other way around.
We need widespread and popular "passenger revolts" to force the FAA to change policy. Make the lives of the airline executives hell and use political power to nationalize them yesterday. Privitization of the air was a massive mistake.
Business class gives me a bed to sleep on, and first class is beyond that. That don’t exist in the 80s let alone 60s
If the whole price had to be flat and bundled into the ticket the experience would be better.
It's also an industry that competes on price, and that tends toward a spiral to the bottom in quality. They aren't allowed to skimp too much on safety stuff, and if they did it'd cost more in the long run, but they are incentivized to make seats tiny and uncomfortable and nickel and dime.
Passengers preferred carry-on long before fees because checked bags take longer or get lost. I’m not aware of any data showing per-passenger load / unload times have increased.
Per-plane load / unload times have definitely increased, because the average passenger count per flight has increased. Bigger planes + fewer empty seats.
Still, as an example of the best possible case, it does make me wonder how much more efficient loading a plane could be. I can imagine some magic way to use all of the doors, even if in the short term it means walking on the tarmac to one of 4-6 stair cases.
Maybe it doesn't matter. I wonder if anyone has calculated if such a system would save (or lose) money.
https://thepointsguy.com/news/why-the-american-airlines-shut...
I get free checked bags through my preferred airline's credit card, but still almost never do it because it adds so much time and frustration. The number of times I've had to wait an additional hour+ at baggage claim is ridiculous. And I've had bags lost/misrouted a stupid percentage of the time considering how infrequently I check bags. Fortunately never lost for good, but getting your bags days after you arrive is not great.
Even airlines like Alaska that have their "20 minute guarantee" often exceed it but get away with it because to make a claim you have to wait in line at the understaffed baggage office, wasting even more time after late bags. Get real.
If airlines/airports want to incentivize checking bags they need to do more than just make it free, but make it fast and reliable, too.
I’d pay $60 more per flight just to not have to deal with other people screwing with giant carry on bags, and the repeated announcements that there’s no room in the overhead compartments.
As a bonus, they also set the sizes for checked luggage slightly below industry standards. Good luck finding something close to but below their linear inch limit. I figured this out because instead of checking three small bags, the family now checks one that’s right up to the weight + size limit.
They used to be the best domestic airline (due to enshittification with all the other carriers), and also one of the cheapest. They could have just raised ticket prices by $50 on average and still have been one of the cheapest.
Instead of realizing they were the premium choice, they’re racing to become one of the worst airlines. They even recently announced they’re going to charge extra for legroom early next year.
I wonder how much it will cost them to move the seats around so some of them have inadequate legroom, and how many rows that’ll add.
Anyway, yes, flights have gotten much worse in the last ten years.
It’s been awhile since I’ve boarded less than Group 4 on Delta. But I don’t remember it being that bad even with group 5 - Silver medallion, credit card holders and economy travel.
I notice the difference when flying out of MCO with for instance TSA+Clear now and flying out of ATL with TSA+Clear where everyone has it.
Other things like the one Delta lounge is never at max capacity at MCO. But we have to find one (using the app) out of the 9 Delta lounges + Centurion lounge at ATL that’s big crowded.
We still end up flying in and out of ATL a lot to see friends and family.
This is really a safety issue. And tbf, you don't need more. I've traveled internationally with just a laptop bag.
My personal experience is I've had my luggage lost twice in the last 10 years at an average of 6 flights per year, so my personal incidence rate seems to be 2%
Still sucks when it does happen though.
My wife and I literally had everything we owned in 4 suitcases for a year and carryon back packs for our electronics.
We got rid of everything we owned that wouldn’t fit in four suitcases in 2022 and hopped around different cities for a year on planes. Even then, if one of our suitcases had been lost, we would have used the airline reimbursement and just gone shopping.
I can't even put my toothbrush in a checked bag anymore.
Cavity Filling: $300
Still having teeth in my 70s: Priceless
And no, it's not just a laptop bag. The list of things with batteries in our daily life is huge, and telling people to skip it just so that you can get on a plane a bit faster isn't reasonable.
I thought there is now a battery size allowance that allows these to go under the plane.
I agree, but I think another big incentive for people to bring carryons is how the airlines deal with checked baggage. All too often you have to wait forever to collect your bags, or your bag gets damaged, or your bag gets lost (usually not permanently).
With checked bag fees, the airlines took one of the worst aspects of their own service and started charging more for it. And they wonder why nobody wants to check a bag.
If airlines took checked bags seriously I'd check bags more often -- even if I had to pay to check them.
They board and deboard planes insanely quickly. Just about the only good thing about those airlines is that they are super dedicated to on-time operations and not wasting time. They can’t afford to waste any time when they’re offering $25 international flights.
Of course, not having 9 boarding groups of various status levels helps a lot too.
Yet almost 20 years later, the fees largely remain, little has improved.
I’m surprised there hasn’t been a discount airline that mandates everyone travel nude without any bags at all.
Would make security and boarding a breeze… no more boarding groups! Planes would be lighter — reduced fuel cost — more environmentally friendly.
Could even charge for premium robes on arrival.
I'm a frequent flyer, and the sheer carelessness of how people waste the time of everyone behind them in the boarding queue still surprises me. As if in the moment they reach their aisle they immediately forget they, too, were waiting...
I do not remember things to be so bad 20 years ago, and even 10 years ago. Some airline staff was quite active in herding the cattle back then, but also the cattle maybe was not as ignorant as today.
But maybe I am just becoming an old, grumpy man, and nothing has really changed. Who knows.
They have decided to be evil.
All low costs companies in Europe have been charging for carry ons since the end of Covid. You are only allowed a backpack which has to fit under the sit in front of you for free and adding carry ons is quite expensive, can be nearly as much as the ticket.
Classic airlines have started weighting carry ons before boarding too so it’s only a matter of time before they charge.
For a normal traveler and unless you do a very short trip, prices have actually significantly increased in the past few years.
Maybe in aggregate flights have fewer delays but every single flight I’ve taken this year has been delayed (on top of the padded flight times the article mentions). I’ve flown about half a dozen trips.
I also hate the argument that the free market should solve the pricing problem. Airlines have exclusivity on airport gates. Any frequent flier on the SFO -> EWR route knows that if you want to save money you can book an Alaska flight instead of United but Alaska has significantly fewer gates and usually gets delayed when arriving waiting for one. Flights aren’t exactly equal commodities and even if the airlines were well-run, contracts for these gates are locked in.
Pricing stats here also fail to account for business class vs economy pricing. Business class prices on tickets have skyrocketed, way outstripping purported CPI. In some cases prices have doubled or more since COVID.
> Business class prices on
> tickets have skyrocketed
Business class tickets are bought by companies not people. You pay for that "subsidy" through more expensive products to pay for that exec's stupid flight to a symposium where they all talk about how great they are and how important their ideas are.
Now I'm wondering what percentage of people in First/Business class are paying for the flight themselves.
In semi-retirement, I probably do need to burn down my points though.
Otoh, I have minor elite status and have gotten upgraded to cattle plus the last couple flights which might be nice enough.
We aren’t budget travelers and we have been on a plane for leisure 12+ times a year since 2021. We are both Platinum Medallion on Delta and get automatic C+ upgrades at time of booking and enjoy our lounge access (via credit cards).
This includes for people making 500K+ a year. Still forced to sit in coach unless they pay out of pocket.
Normies ruined business class. Can't get business class tickets on international flights for anything less than 10X and often more like 20X the price of economy. It should be no more than 4X.
Live in DFW, which is an American hub and my largest option for direct flights and flight availability in general which is why I mention them
Is it? I thought that trend reversed in 2020.
personally, i was on a flight in May from SFO to EWR and my flight flew 2h30m towards Newark, then back to SFO when EWR stopped accepting landings: https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/united-flight-that-was...
granted this was an especially egregious situation and not the norm, but it feels like these types of issues are on the rise based on my anecdotal experience. there were a number of full ground stops at newark due to ATC in the weeks after this. it was national news.
It's odd that in his rush to point the finger at the government monopoly, he seems to have missed that a free market where customers select flights mostly on price naturally tends towards airlines operating lower cruise speeds for better operating economy, and not allowing loads of wiggle room in their schedules to make up for delays.
The idea that actually the real reason why aircraft are operating more slowly and delayed more is because there aren't enough ATCs in position doesn't pass the sniff test at all for anyone that knows the slightest thing about commercial aviation
Also I think in general increasing utilization of aeroplanes increases revenues and thus makes things more profitable as money is not made while not flying. Easiest way to achieve this is to remove slack like shortening turnover times. Which then results in cascading delays as planes simply are not available at times.
Well... I mean, objectively, there are not enough ATCs. Staff are being scheduled 6 days a week. Towers at small airports are operating on reduced hours because there aren't enough people, and towers are some airports are being operated with less than full staff (so each person is working multiple tasks).
Whether or not the very real staff shortage is what is causing the delays is not 100% clear. My intuition is that it is, but I don't have any actual data to support that.
Ground delays due to ATC staffing shortages are real. It’s not a secret, statistics about it are kept.
Off the top of my head, it is has affected Austin, Newark and most major destinations in Canada this year. That is not an exhaustive list by any means.
We've got percentages for delays attributed to the National Aviation System (including those for reasons other than ATC understaffing, like congestion management) here[1], it's less than half of those attributed to the carrier, with a slight trend fall. That doesn't mean ATC understaffing isn't a problem (patching gaps in shift patterns is bad for a whole bunch of safety related reasons, for a start), it means that the author is dead wrong that airlines won't do anything to jeopardise on time performance and government must be the only bottleneck. [1]https://www.bts.gov/browse-statistical-products-and-data/inf...
His conclusion is that there are a multitude of causes, among them, ATC staffing delays.
I doubt an economist a little less enthusiastic about the ability of markets to give people exactly what they want than Max would have missed the obvious dynamic that when airlines are competing mainly on price in a thin-margin capital-intensive industry they absolutely can capture market share (from paying customers, not just points collectors) by accepting the risk of degraded service.
What happens is typically that they hold you on the ground or at the gate until they can appropriately release your flight plan.
Because business class is a luxury?
Sure, but business class is still 100% full (and frequent fliers complain that they aren't getting upgrades, so it seems to be mostly paid).
This is like when companies complain that they can't find any good devs, but don't want to pay market rate.
My experience of past 2-3 years, even if it's only 30 minutes or so and prior to boarding, there's always a delay now
Flights arrive early or late or never at all, gates change frequently due to airport congestion. And the workers who are managing this are not known for their precision, so it has to be a super fault tolerant system.
1. the airfare inflation chart is based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI which is calculated differently from the other metrics in the article; it does take into account routes popularity.
2. today’s average Economy ticket is different from the 1990s ticket: meals, seat pitch, seat selection, baggage. service changed to the point that 1990 Standard Economy is more similar to 2025 Premium Economy.
I think it's reasonable. Even if you depart the gate on time, there could be things out of the airliners' control that cause delays, such as a long queue to take off.
It's $300 but the Peak Design backpack is amazing. It has one massive compartment which makes it easy to efficiently cram stuff in there. https://www.peakdesign.com/products/travel-backpack?Size=45L...
Most backpacks seem to compete on maximizing pocket count which isn't good for tetris packing.
Although, this seems to apply only to hardshell wheeled cases - I walked aboard with my backpack & shoulder bag without any issues, and fit my backpack into an overhead compartment and shoulder bag under my seat with no problems.
But next time, I may try to pack everything into a single backpack, and re-configure things once I'm in my seat so I have easy access to a smaller subset of stuff in my shoulderbag instead.
If I see that happening and I'm traveling light enough, I've merged my backpack into my duffle bag so that I have one single "personal item" for under the seat in front of me. Nobody ever seems to care that it doesn't cleanly fit.
But jeez, forcing check-ins during Group 1 is worse than I've ever seen it. I guess it's more and more popular to use two hard-shell carry-ons and put them into the overhead compartment. And I guess the airline just sees it as an incentive for you to buy a more expensive seat.
I don't think this is that unreasonable. Gate staff can look around and count how many bags people have, and they know how much space is in the overhead bins. Not to mention that nearly every flight will run out of overhead space, so they might as well start demanding people check bags sooner rather than later.
Though the overhead bin space probably wouldn't be as bad if airlines were better about enforcing size limits. So often, a roller bag is just an inch or two too tall, so has to be placed lengthwise in the overhead bin, making it take up space that could have fit 2-3 bags.
e.g. If you max out the allowed dimensions with United you get a 45.08L carry on and a 23.65L personal item.
And most "cheapest tickets" now no longer include a carry on bag, only a personal item.
2. Flights get slowed down for everyone when people are exceeding the underseat bag size limits - sometimes the bags do get checked in the metal sizers at the gate, which causes obvious slowdowns, and 300 passengers with 45L underseat bags are going to take significantly longer to board/deplane than 300 passengers with <24L underseat bags.
3. I'm skeptical that you can actually fit a 45L bag under plane seats without ever inconveniencing other passengers. Seats are pretty tight and it's pretty easy for a larger bag to push your legs sideways so they cross the midpoint of the armrest. And various planes don't have dividers between every under-seat area, so if your bag is oversized it's easy for your bag and/or feet to spill into your neighbour's under-seat area. But maybe you're small or very disciplined and are able keep your body and belongings in your own seat area, I've (probably) never sat next to you, so can't say for sure.
I've mine daily for 5-10 years, they're great.
There's even gems like "no carry ons" and "no airline miles" tickets now. They cost the same as the lowest fares last year.
And at the end of the day, operates at a pre-tax[1] profit margin of 5% (in a good year), or 0% in a bad one.
If all airlines became altruistic non-profit entities tomorrow that only exist to serve their customers and nobody else, your ticket prices wouldn't drop more than ~$10-20.
[1] Post-tax, it's at 2.5%, but I'm not qualified to get into whether or not there's Hollywood accounting going on.
But then again, these short flights are often CHEAP. Even in “first”, where the perk is…a wider chair, sitting near the front and better snacks i suppose.
Example: I can fly from NYC to Chicago for $80 in economy. In first it’s about $200 on delta. I certainly wouldn’t expect free access to a good lounge with decent food for free at that price. It would be hard for me to be disappointed as a flyer at those prices.
Oops, that's gonna cost you extra.
I stopped flying twenty five years ago. I think it's one of the better decisions I've made.
Airlines cut their costs hard during covid, but never undid most of those changes after covid was over. So now you have non-low-cost airlines that charge extra for luggage, for example. Or not provide a meal during a 5-hour flight. Or flight schedules so bad that booking sites insist that the best option to get form one European capital to another, with only constraint that you need to get there in the evening of a particular day, is 3 separate flights taking 2/3 of that day.
That's not to say that the average airline worker is like that; it just seemed like the bottom fell out, so that the floor on what my worst experience could be while flying became substantially worse compared to times before.
There is just a widespread kindness gap in our society.
I wish young people knew this, but they will find out too late in life.
The employer/employee relationship is basically by definition transactional.
SOME employers do reward hard work and going above-and-beyond, but it's becoming more and more rare.
The simple fact is, giving raises and promoting top performers is not good for shareholder value.
> benefits of being loyal to people who would reward loyalty
The company I work at just laid off ~100 people. One was from my team and was a great worker that took on additional responsibilities and worked extra hours to get things done. Still got let go. How's that for rewarding loyalty?
This hasn't been my experience at all. And to be quite frank, whenever I see someone claim this, my cynical misanthropic brain assumes that's what's ACTUALLY happening is that customers are asking for exceptions beyond policy that customer service personnel can't give them and then claim they're getting poor service or that the customer service rep was rude for telling them "no" on something.
I worked retail and fast food for over 10 years. People suck. And while I got out of that industry 13 years ago, I know that people have only gotten worse. People demand the world and then complain about poor service when they don't get it.
It doesn't help that it's a weighted average. The people who don't suck tend to require fairly little time. (In fact, many of them may well suck, too, but you don't have time to notice.) The people who suck a lot always require a lot of your time.
We were instructed to upcharge customers for being jerks, and use our own judgement to determine the fee.
I was so mad.
I flew probably 30 times during covid restrictions, and as you say, it was absolute bliss. That return flight reminded me why flying was miserable before COVID restrictions and is miserable now.
The airlines -- like all other MBA-run businesses now -- are titrating their services: They cut staff and pay and quality until customers start to loudly complain or leave and then they restore just enough staff or quality until the shouting stops.
They do this repeatedly in a closed feedback loop. Any CEO that doesn't work this way in the modern era gets fired.
My poor travel experiences are due to airlines lying about delays and having inadequate resources to deal with the problems that led to those delays.
The trade-off isn't that there are men in cargo shorts on my flight because it's cheap, it's at the airline will strand you in some hell hole and won't pick up the phone for hours.
Is it summer travel then holiday travel then a winter spring slump? That would support the author's hypothesis that congestion is to blame.
1. What about the annual peaks roughly 5 minutes. Seem to occur in winter? I would have thought summer delays are more, on the average?
2. Mentioning DEI at FAA without any substantial data tarnishes an otherwise interesting study.
This was suggested to me six months ago by someone who was extreme right wing, (going as far as to say that the FAA only hired non-white employees) and I found the claims bizarre enough to research on my own. They claimed that this was a known fact, whether you read left or right news sources, but when I did my research (not on bias, but on actual hiring results), it said that historically, the FAA has been about 90% white, and currently is about 70% white (IIRC), which is a far cry from suggesting that the FAA has race and gender quotas.
Again, here, the article makes the same claim, but this time with a citation (!), so I wondered if there was some truth to it, that I missed, earlier, but again, the truth does not pan out. It seems that a few members of the NBCFAE (National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees) stepped over the line in their attempts to to change hiring practices that were preventing black candidates from being considered (going from increasing the diversity of the candidate pool, which is laudable, to discriminating in order to change up the racial mix, which is illegal).
However, in all of this, it's not the FAA acting, just a few powerful individuals from the NBCFAE. That doesn't change the fact that something bad happened, just the characterization of it ends up being completely misleading.
If you're not making a connection, I don't see any downside to arriving earlier than expected. You have a bit more time to do what you please.
it's like picking the cheapest restaurant every time and complaining you get crap food
you have to research which restaurant to go to
But short haul, it's like having a choice between McDonalds or Burger King. 28" vs 29" pitch. £40 vs £50 for a checked bag etc.
We could have much lower prices and operating under the same federal safety guidelines, but rich ass pilots are exploiting collective bargaining to keep their salaries unbelievably high when they don't need to be.
That's not... rich, not in 2025. That's comfortable in most major American cities, but not rich. And then you have to take into account the fact that these pilots are away from home quite often, and have dozens, if not hundreds, of lives in their hands when they do their jobs, and that makes me think they're fairly compensated for doing the actual labor that the company needs to operate. Meanwhile, the CEOs make more in a year than most Americans will make in an entire lifetime [1]. And that's not even getting into some of the dividends that airlines pay people who just happen to possess a piece of paper.
[0]https://simpleflying.com/salary-us-pilot-2025/ [1]https://onemileatatime.com/insights/highest-paid-airline-ceo...
I agree that's not exactly rich, but that's a damn sight more than "comfortable". That's really good money. I'm not even saying that's the problem with air travel like GP claimed, but let's not pretend that $160k isn't a great salary. That's more than I make as a principal systems engineer in the tech industry!
No offense to you or any other engineers, but I actually think the pilot who is responsible for hundreds of lives per flight should make more than us software folks.
I work in tech but it seems like to be a high earning pilot you just need to:
- practice flying for 1,500+ hours. That can take years unless doing it full time.
- pay 50k+ for pilot training.
- fly undesirable routes at weird times and to weird locations for 10+ years, until you “make the big bucks”.
- be away from home for approximately half the year.
- be on your “A game” daily otherwise you risk killing yourself and hundreds of passengers on your plane.
and more.
Wishing you luck on your journey, god speed complainer!
/s :)
In all seriousness I can personally think of much easier ways to earn $200k+. I don’t think pilots are overpaid.
Lower prices ? Where ? In EU surely not.
Do you think there is no man-made climate change?