This is pretty funny. It's like a case study in the armchair expert. Here's a person who is not a travel industry veteran, but was curious about something, so they just started googling facts and figures, tried to find a trend, then looked for evidence to back up the trend they were looking for, then googled for "explanations" (read: news articles from mainstream media) to justify the trends they were looking for. At no time did they actually talk to somebody in the travel industry. Just a lot of googling, vague questions, and hand-wavey answers.
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.
With air travel, and most kinds of tourism, and customer service, and actually with most commodified experiences, the affordability and mass availability is the thing that makes the experience subjectively worse. It's the other people. Farting. Coughing. When you treat people like animals, they act like animals. At the same time, when they act like animals, why not treat them as such?
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.
Not necessarily. It isn't the amount of people that is causing your discomfort -- the airline is always going to optimize for a full plane (and environmentally, we should want them to). It is the fact that we have been taught to tolerate people when they are being obnoxious and discourteous. If the airlines just ejected people who were being an asshole and fellow travelers would call out and shame bad behavior, it might lead to a more pleasant experience.
The seats are also too small, at least for Western men (and increasingly for women too).
I am quite tall and find flying an experience to be endured by gritting my teeth, but for taller and heavier people it is almost torture. I recently saw a man with half his leg in the aisle, taking up almost all the walking space. If you are unlucky enough to sit next to a very large man, a fairly common sight especially in the US, the entire flight becomes a series of small and large movements, squirming and twisting.
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.
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.
The person you are replying to was alluding to the fact that 'ejecting' someone out of a plane that was flying would be a demonstration the crew's intolerance for obnoxiousness. In essence, if you don't behave you will be murdered. Seeing this happen to one passenger would almost certainly make everyone else on the flight quiet down and sit still.
In my experience, the mother tends to be fairly mortified herself—and, generally being closer to the screamer than anyone else is, would certainly make it stop if she could.
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 simply cannot control a screaming child easily and the only way is to let them be for a while. If you don't understand it, you are really immature and need to learn some basics about human society.
Let's push it a little farther than a screaming child. Something the parent can control is their child hitting the back of my seat. The only time I've ever said something to a parent on a flight was when that was happening, and after several warning looks over my shoulder that the mother ignored. And what I did wasn't shout. I basically turned around and hissed at them to control their child. That stopped it without drawing any excessive attention.
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.
> Me and 80% of the people on the plane can’t stand the selfishness
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.
> If any airline ever proposes something like that, the backlash will be swift and massive.
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.
In theory, yes, you could enforce better conduct (although this might harm the bottom line). But I also think that when you place people in cramped conditions, they inherently begin to behave more antisocially and become less amicable. For every inch of legroom or width you shave off a seat, I think there's a non-negligible amount of discomfort that leads to more annoyance, which in turn leads to worse behavior. At some point, some portion of the consumers do explode into outright hostility or madness, and the airlines mostly seem to be tuning their services to just above that point.
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.
Culture and behavior aren't strictly consequences of economics.
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)
> In my experience for example, people on flights outside of the US tend to be far more polite, amicable,
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".
Not really. Very crowded airports and tight seating makes whole flying experience worse than before. Nothing to do with obnoxious people.
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.
This too. All else being equal, if you doubled the price per flight and halved the number of passengers you crammed on a plane, you'd have less than half as many people flying and a lot fewer flights, hence a lot less pollution. My proof of this is that if it or equal value to double the price and halve the seats, some airline would be doing it.
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.
Isn't that a broader societal thing? It feels like American culture has gotten more tolerant than it ever has, and we're all to patiently zip it while the person in front of us stands on the left side of the escalator we're trying to walk up, instead of the right like everyone else. Or someone is listening to Instagram feeds at full volume on the train as they flip through one stupidity after the other.
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.
This doesn’t explain why the flexible compartment in front of me, on the back of the seats, is either less usable than 10 years ago (ie too inflexible), or doesn’t exist at all on some flights (Hello, Ryanair).
I think it's about improving the turnaround on planes. When a plane lands, the crew has to get everyone out, clean the cabin, then get the next flight's passengers in -- all as quickly as possible. The shorter this turnaround, the more flights the plane can fly, and the more money the airline can make.
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.
Counter offer... the turnaround time is locked in, cargo unloading and refueling, but fewer tasks mean fewer crew members needed to perform those tasks in the given time. So rather than 5 cleaners descending on an arriving plane, they can put 2 or 3 on it and pocket the 2 salaries they are no longer paying.
Just an offer, I don't actually know the airlines' historical cleaning crew requirement number trends.
It might sound funny in a juvenile way, but it just takes the uncontrolled flatulence of one impolite passenger to make the flight experience miserable for all the others.
I was recently on a long-ish flight of a few hours and there was a passenger, whom I could not locate, who every 15 minutes or so was freeing themselves of some poison.
The misery of the experience is difficult to describe, but I am sure that many will have felt something similar.
All it takes is one rude bully to turn what should be a miraculous experience, like flying ought to be, into a depressing one. Many parallels can be drawn.
What feels like a rude bully, could actually be someone with a terminal bowel cancer. And just as much as they could maybe find charcoal underpants, you could also bring a $5 R95 odor-eliminating mask on the plane. I'm not saying there aren't unavoidable terrible experiences, but most of the misery people in the developed world experience is a state of mind.
I am all for interpreting other people's behavior charitably, but I would consider the terminally ill passenger to be the exception rather than the rule.
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.
It's not about protection as much as finding ways to cope with things you don't like. People fart. It smells for a bit, but the smell (being a gas) will diffuse eventually. You can do other things to cope, like bring things to mask the smell, but you can also just... accept it. It's just a smell.
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.
Although seemingly enlightened, this is a terrible way to treat other people who don't respect your right to a normal existence.
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.
What are you going to do about it? The farting, for example. You gonna stick a cork up their butthole? No; you're just going to sit their in your seat and feel upset. Doesn't really matter if you have some imaginary right or not. You're just stewing in your own mental hell.
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.
If I see where it is coming from, I am certainly shaming them for being disgusting, impolite, vulgar, and disrespectful to other people. I am not afraid of being confrontational. If the confrontation escalates, verbally, of course, so be it.
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.
Believe it or not, I think some of this excessive flatulence can also be blamed on the airlines trying to save cost. And I don't just mean on the "short rib and pasta salad."
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 is wrong to assume that it was a man. Second, yes, in the vast majority of cases, it is a voluntary action that should be frowned upon when performed in public. At least that is the case for me and the people I am familiar with and respect.
In the comfort of their own homes or the middle of the vast prairie, they can pass gas on their companions or poor herbaceous plants as much as they want.
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.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Flatulence is as much voluntary as sneezing, sure you can try to hold it in but 1) it's not always possible and 2) it might actually be bad for you.
And for some people it can just start happening out of the blue in the wrong moment.
I'm sorry, but it seems like you're talking to a bot, some kind of artificial intelligence entity, or an alien who has never experienced the sensation of having gas in their stomach.
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.
The problem with air travel is it is too fast. Or at least it is presented as fast. This implies if something is unpleasant, it shouldn't be a big deal because you shouldn't be exposed to it for long.
The on the ground part of flying has certainly gotten worse (honourable mention to Brexit). Which for flights of modest length is actually the longest part of the process. People keep coming up with creative ways of making it more painful.
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?
Why does he need to talk to someone in the travel industry to evaluate the experience of traveling? Yes, we all agree with Louis CK that just being able to fly is a marvel. But it still sucks and it has gotten worse.
It is news because a lot of people intuitively don't get this point. Also they would not show at 11 as news would rather be promoting more travel instead of covering downsides.
We had cheap airfare and significantly better passenger accommodation 20 years ago. For the most part folks didn't act like assholes in public either. So yeah, things have gotten worse.
I was thinking 30 years ago. The response to 9/11 definitely made the flying experience worse in the US. Plus of course the gradual shrinking of seat space.
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.
Amd yet their conclusion at the start seems to nail it?
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.
I remember flying coast to coast in the US in the 90s cheaper than I can get tickets today, but that's not accounting for inflation, so probably not really cheaper.
> Here's a person who is not a travel industry veteran, but was curious about something
> 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.
I agree with your broader point. But I used to get a free beer on British Airways flights and no longer do. It's been many years since I flew on a plane with even a compartment for my stuff in front of me let alone a screen. Admittedly I fly less than I used to but that's at least partly because the relative experience vs cost of trains has got better and I have no reason to fly across the ocean.
As if talking to travel industry experts is a sure way to quantify the subjective experience travelers? Sorry, I prefer the perspective of people and data that depend upon the travel industry indirectly, not as their cash cow.
With the way they pack people into airplanes like sardines, most of the reason for why "air travel sucks" today is that too many others are doing it!
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 wonder how much of the increased schedule times are due to baggage fees? Here is my theory:
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.
Carry on policy has triggered an arms race for passengers and carry on size. I usually just bring a small backpack because it’s convenient and I don’t want to lug two bags through the airport.
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.
Almost 45 years after my first flight, I still carry a backpack. The same one in fact, though its waterproofing is long gone.
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 need dire circumstances to travel with more than a backpack. Waiting for baggage claim drains my soul. Traveling with just a carry on means I can walk off the plane into a cab without further downtime.
I'm the opposite. I hate having to drag my lugguage around while I'm in the airport. I'm happy to wait for my baggage to be delivered. My life isn't so frantic that 10-15 minutes more is the end of the world.
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 most frequent flight lands at 11:50pm, and is often 30+ minutes late. The last thing I want is to spend my "down time" at 1am waiting 30+ minutes for my bag in an uncomfortable, loud, jarring space. I'd rather just take a backpack and already be in bed by the time my luggage would have shown up.
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.
I don't enjoy carrying my baggage around either, but I very much don't enjoy one extra line to stand in to check my bag, and after a long flight I very much don't enjoy having to wait even longer to get to my destination. It's not a matter of "downtime". I want to be to my hotel or house or whatever as soon as possible.
Due to airline status etc. I always have a free checked bag, but I never, ever use it.
I’m team checked luggage. When plane lands, everyone is rushing out of airport, but I causally walk, perhaps grab some coffee or snacks before heading to baggage claim. It helps me relax and get energized for the driving.
I took some equipment once so figured I’d check my bag at the same time as I hard to wait for baggage anyway
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.
Same, also a backpack simply does not have enough room for any trip longer than a couple of days. By the time you add underwear for every day, shirts for every day, multiple pairs of pants, some pajamas, toiletries... you're at a carry-on at least, and it's not hard to fill a checked bag.
It's not the waiting at the end that kills me, it's the waiting at the start.
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.
I've had good luck waterproofing things with Nikwax. I've got a 20 year old Tom Bihn bag that I've applied it to as well as outdoor clothing and it's been great!
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.
Airlines should get more strict with regards to the overhead bin. Both with bag size and placement. Planes can probably fit a certain sized bag for everyone who brings one, but too many flyers seem to intentionally bring bigger bags or place them oddly so as not to share the space.
In other words, it's too time consuming for flight attendants to do it for customers. Why? Because it's too time consuming.
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.
Wow another issue that comes down to "Airplanes are packed with too many people"
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.
Or maybe someone 6 foot tall should just pay the more expensive ticket with larger leg room. Why should someone 5 foot tall pay for your comfort.
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.
Business class is 20x the price of economy (it should be no more than 4X and that should be taxpayer funded), isn't enough of the plane and is constantly sold out months before the flight on long flights.
"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.
I’m sat in premium economy now, with plenty of legroom (39” pitch I believe) and width (2-4-2 rather than 3-4-3). Feels similar to the first class seat ton cruise was in in the first mission impossible film. Except without the smoking, and far cheaper.
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
I mean that air travel should be nationalized in general, with whatever losses come from offering subsidized business class (no more than 5X economy) being ate by the tax payer.
The only place I ever got well priced business class flights of anywhere near 9+ hours were Japanese airlines, so maybe it is just because we are too tall!
Don't forget figuring out a way to tie overhead bin space to assigned seats to keep "overhead bin pirates" from storing their carryons in the front of the plane when their seats are in the back...
I guess I’m one of your pirates. Especially when I notice that most of the bins are closed near the back, where my seat usually is, I’ll use the first open space that I see. Bonus is that I don’t have to maneuver my suitcase as far. Drawback is that I have to keep an eye on things during deboarding: once I had to chase down some idiot who exited the plane with my bag. Why do you believe that people are supposed to use the bins next to their seats?
Well, for one thing, on many planes the space above FC and whatever their premium economy class is called is specifically labeled for use of passengers seated in those areas. For another, it's just common courtesy. I get if you are boarding late and there are only a few available bins but in my experience the bins at the back fill last not first, so you really should have no problem storing your bag near your seat.
A bullet train holds 2x to 4x the passengers and loads in 2-5 minutes. I get they are very different. Those 2x to 4x passgeners load into 16 cars (so 16 doors). The baggage does not have to be stowed before take off nor do any cargo holds need to be loaded. The aisles are wider. Etc.
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.
The real limiting factor is the willingness of people to actually follow the system, which I think he mentions but doesn't examine much. It'd be interesting to see if any of the papers test the better systems to see how they fair with noncompliant passengers.
My theory is that the increased turnaround times are due to the fact that people are too stupid to board a plane properly. And Airline staff is doing less about it than, say, 10 years ago, probably being afraid of social media shitstorms or whatever.
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.
I'm a _somewhat_ frequent flyer (5-8 trips a year). I've never experienced a plane being delayed by the time it take passengers to enter/exit the plane. I have, however, experienced delays because the baggage handlers are still loading the plane.
For that reason, I've never understood the obsession with loading the plane quickly.
I don't think the claim is that boarding causes flights to depart later than scheduled. Of course they plan for the time it takes to board. The claim is that, despite being predictable, it significantly increases the turn-around time for airplanes.
If they’re not done loading the plane, they don’t have to make an announcement about it because it’s self evident, whereas if everyone is sitting down and ready to go, they will let everyone know what the holdup is.
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've also been on flights where they asked us to hurry, and then we (flight attendants included) sat and waited for other things to be completed. Not saying that was what you experienced, of course! Nor am I complaining. My understanding is that gate attendants get penalized if they're the reason the plane is held up, so I understand why they'd play it safe and hurry people.
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)!
I've often have the opposite experience. I fly a LOT (4+ times per month) and I hear the bag doors close and watch the handlers drive their ramp away while people are still staggering on-board more than 1/2 the time.
A lot of pathology in air travel is related to the fact that people use aggregate search engines to find flights and sort by price. The lowest up-front base fare tends to win. So that encourages airlines to nickel and dime later, such as by charging for bags and a million other things, making the whole experience worse.
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.
I agree 100% and when I encounter people that don't believe this theory I point out that, once upon a time, Southwest Airlines used to be able to turn an entire 737 in 10 minutes.
I agree, but it's worth noting that those 10 minute turns were probably -100 or -200 series aircraft with a capacity of about 100 passengers, while a modern Max-8/9/10 aircraft holds about 200 (who still board through a single door).
Is it possible this has anything to do with cheaper tickets and more amateur flyers? There are always some families new to flying that seem to gum up the works.
If that were the case I don’t think Southwest would ever have been record holders in turnaround time. Their tickets have historically been cheaper than many competitors.
The one advantage SW has is the open seating. People will naturally disperse along the length of the plane so as to avoid the middle seat. This could prevent many traffic jams that otherwise slow boarding with the rest of the passengers stuck behind a slow loader.
Not sure if it would actually make an impact -you will still get blockages. Would need a queuing theorist to comment.
We did SW once and never again. Some things we learned the hard way having never flown SW before: You have to pay extra if you don't want to be dead last on the plane, and evidently, everyone pays extra, because we were dead last. Not sitting together for sure (you have to pay extra for that too). So we finally get on the plane, and all the carry on space is already used up. We ask the flight attendant "so what now" and she just shrugs like it's my problem. I tell her OK we'll just leave the bags in the aisle then, or will you gate check them for us? Finally, she huffs and proceeds to open every overhead bin one by one until we find two of them with small backpacks that we have to yank down and convince the owners to stick under the seat in front of them. All the while the rest of the passengers are looking at us like we're preventing their ambulance from getting to the hospital.
No thanks. I'll take a slower boarding with a traditional airline that doesn't make their passengers feel like a burden.
While true, in summer travel season more than half the plane will board early when SW allows families with small children to board between groups A and B. There's no real definition of small child and SW will let a party of 8 board early because one of them is 4 years old. Mom, Dad, teenage kids, grandma...etc.
You really do need to pay for A boarding if you must sit together. Or game the system and claim you need to preboard.
It's insane how Southwest is willing to throw away a unique competitive edge that nobody else has, and their loyal customer base with it. It's also insane that the activist investors pressured them to do something that stupid. In one stroke Southwest went from being an airline worth going out of your way to fly, to just another airline which has to compete on price alone. Absolutely boneheaded move.
I intentionally chose Southwest for my last flight because the old policies -- included bags and free-form seating-- made me feel better about the experience. I didn't need the free checked bags, but I appreciated not being pressured into guessing exactly how many pairs of pants I'm going to need for a trip I booked 3 months in advance.
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.
The number of SWA customers who needed wheelchairs to board (earlier than able-bodied pax) and were healed enough mid-flight to be able to walk off at the destination was astounding. It’ll be sad to lose all those miraculous recoveries.
For those not familiar with Southwest Airlines, they famously offered two free checked bags for years after all other major carriers started charging for them. Sadly, they ended that practice earlier this year.
The article itself shows why scheduled times grew: so that airlines could report a very high percentage of on-time flights, which have regulatory and marketing advantages that they did not before.
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.
A very high percentage of on-time flights is an actual good thing and not just a reporting trick, even if all you have to change to achieve it is the reporting.
Honestly I'd love to check bags more often, but it's too frequently an inordinately slow and risky proposition.
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.
> And if they feel like they really want to be evil, switch the fees to carryons.
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.
United already charges for carryons (the basic-economy fare only includes items small enough to fit under the seat), and if you bring one they charge you more than the checked bag fee to gate-check it.
I also experienced recently that gate agents will lie about this to decrease turn around time if a plane is running late. We were forced to gate check ours after being told the plane was too full to hold all, only to get onboard and find ample space. When we asked the flight attendant, they apologized and said they did not tell them to do this, but it’s unfortunately common at airports with frequent delays. So charge ridiculous bag fees, forcing everyone to carry on, which delays boarding, so they lie to you and check your bag for free (which maybe you would’ve done to begin with if that was an option), only to board a plane and feel duped. All around great experience!
> I've long contended that airlines should get rid of checked bag fees.
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.
The budget carriers in Europe (RyanAir, EasyJet, etc) all have fees for carry on bags that are almost as high as checked bags and they only even offer those fees to people who have purchased the “up front” premium seats.
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.
How would they charge for carryons though? Would they charge for say a bag of food you just bought? Also they'd have to put in infrastructure for charging right at the gate, and I'd imagine that would further slow things down, require more staff etc. Just don't think either thing will happen, since clearly they care a lot more about making money than passenger convenience.
Ryanair already does this in the UK and Frontier does it in the US, so clearly someone has figured out the logistics of it. Both are ultra-low cost carriers (in the same model as Southwest used to be).
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.
For the record, As a carry-on lover and cheapskate, I viscerally dislike this idea. But your logistical objections don't ring true to me.
> 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.
Spirit already does this. You need a special ticket to be allowed to carry on more than a personal item. I've seen people stopped and forced to pay an exorbitant punishment fee to take on a bag when they hadn't purchased a carry on in advance.
The budget airlines have all started getting very strict with carry ons. If your ticket has not paid for the larger carry on size they make you put your bag in the sizing basket and dont let you on if it doesnt fit. There is also a smaller basket for the personal item so you cant just bring a ton of food bags.
They already have the "infrastructure" to prevent one person from bringing on two carry-ons or a carry-on that exceeds the size requirements. I'm not sure what new thing you're imagining they would need.
you're currently allowed a carry-on and a "personal item" like a purse or a small backpack. the carry-on can be stowed, but the personal item has to stay with you in the seat.
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.
I should be entitled to the same amount of space, carry-on space and under seat space, as every other passenger paying for the same class of ticket.
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.
Anecdotally, Southwest flights now take much longer to board because of the stupid checked luggage fee they just introduced.
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.
> 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.
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 tend to board Group 5 and have had only one flight in the past three years where I wasn't able to put my bag in the bin in my row. That flight was one where they decided to force gate checking before the bins were even half full. Lots of disgruntled passengers then.
Airlines have either lost my checked bag or just stolen from it too many times for me to trust them with my possessions again. Maybe if I was transporting horse manure, or unpackaged glitter.
Every single statistic I’ve seen shows that lost luggage happens around 1% of the time. We fly fairly frequently - on average more than once per month and it’s really not something we think about.
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%
It also means that if you fly every week of the year it will likely only happen to you once all year. For the average traveler, it will be more like once in their entire lifetime.
There is absolutely nothing in my checked bag that would be any more than a minor annoyance if it were lost.
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.
You ever try to mail something to or from a developing or semi developed country? You'll be lucky if you ever see it again, let alone have to deal with import controls.
Is this true? Granted I usually just deal with using a standard toothbrush when I go on vacation but I have absolutely put my electric shaver and electric toothbrush in my checked bag without issue.
I thought there is now a battery size allowance that allows these to go under the plane.
You can put the toothbrush in your laptop bag. Although I don't know why you're buying toothbrushes with lithium batteries in them. Even if electric toothbrushes made sense that's still a waste of money compared to the disposable ones.
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.
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.
Perhaps the free market is solving the pricing/timeliness problem, but your fellow travelers value lower prices more than being on time?
> Business class prices on
> tickets have skyrocketed
The people with more disposable income who are subsidizing air travel for the rest of us are giving us an even larger subsidy these days? I feel just terrible about that.
It’s not that simple. Business is representing an ever increasing % of travellers, so airlines are increasing the % of business class seating, leaving fewer seats for economy seating and therefore less availability in economy, so you might not even end up seeing the savings in your flight ticket since more economy passengers are competing with each other.
They're degrading economy to the point where people feel like they have to upgrade. I'm not that tall or large but I can no longer tolerate American's economy seating, my knees are jammed into the seat in front of me before they recline, it's down right painful if they choose to recline.
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
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.
Every time I've flown First/Business class, it's been out of my own pocket. Every time I've had my employer pay for a flight, it's been in cattle class.
Now I'm wondering what percentage of people in First/Business class are paying for the flight themselves.
I fly frequently on average more than once a month and I really don’t see the benefit of first class for domestic flights. I am short though. I’m good with exit row seats.
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).
Domestic at least, I expect a lot is upgrades for status travelers (who have flown a lot of it on company expense accounts). At least that's my experience.
In semi-retirement, I probably do need to burn down my points though.
I think the average flyer can be pretty confident that they're saving more on the flight than the incremental addition to their grocery bills attributable to company executives' flight costs...
YUP! As usual HN downvotes the truth! I have NEVER seen a business who is willing to let people actually travel in business class outside of the C suite and even then I've seen them refuse it for C suite!!!
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.
> 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.
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.
> I also hate the argument that the free market should solve the pricing problem.
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
> 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
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.
They're real and tracked, but they're also not the main reason why airlines aren't on time, or any sort of reason for lower cruise speeds.
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...
The author did not claim that the entire or the main reason for longer flight times was ATC delays. He wouldn’t be dead wrong if he had made that claim since as you note, ATC delays are higher than they were in the 90s. But he didn’t make the claim that ATC was the full and only cause of delays.
His conclusion is that there are a multitude of causes, among them, ATC staffing delays.
The author explicitly dismissed the idea of "greedy airlines" as not passing his "sniff test" whilst the data shows their own actions are a more frequent culprit for delays than aviation services (be they ATC shortages or congestion, which combined only account for <20% of the delays; unlikely to cause of a fourfold increase in long delays by themselves never mind be a reason for slower cruising speeds).
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.
Lower speeds to save on fuel as closing on sound barrier has somewhat sharp increase in air resistance.
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.
Why does Alaska schedule more flights than they have gate slots? Or is it just that anything that delays gate availability is going to impact them first?
May also happens to be the month construction began on one of EWR’s two commonly used runways (though they do have a smaller third runway). This severely reduced the amount of traffic the airport could handle and EWR attempted to keep operating the same amount of scheduled flights as usual, it was a real mess.
How have we not solved the issue of getting everyones baggage off the plane in a timely manner. We've been using these conveyor belt-carousels for over 50 years and the same process for loading and unloading, but people shouldnt have to plan on waiting 45+ minutes after they deplane for their personal belongings in 2025. Lost luggage? The whole system seems archaic to me.
If you think about the complexity of routing bags from a single plane on to potentially dozens of connecting flights and onto the non-connecting carousel, it's actually amazing that the process is not screwed up more frequently.
Of course, but no one is taking the bag physically so its destination. They're putting them on moving pathways that are matched to ever-changing information about gates, flight numbers, etc.
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.
Alaska guarantees bags within 20m of landing. It’s not impossible, most airlines just don’t give a shit because people tend to mentally blame the airport not the airline for baggage experience issues.
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 will say I've been on a number of flights that left late but arrived early/on-time. I think they build a pad into flight time and/or give up fuel efficiency to make up time.
There was an article posted to HN recently (today, even!) that showed how airlines do pad their flight times deliberately.
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.
Airfare alone isn’t a great indicator of price, since airlines have been reducing benefits—luggage generally is an upcharge now, whereas it used to be built into the ticket price.
They are very guilty of shrinkflation in general. For example, first class used to get you access to the airport lounges. Now you need a very expensive subscription of some sort to get access.
Lounges have gotten significantly worse since Covid though with overcrowding issues (with some exceptions like KIX), so I don’t think it’s a particularly great loss. My card lets me pay some token amount to gain access to lounges but I’d rather spend that money to get an actual meal cooked for me rather than a buffet and then sit in a quiet corner of the terminal than a crowded lounge.
This varies: a family member of mine flew cross-country a few weeks ago first class (on the company's dime) and was given automatic access to the lounges there.
International first class / business class travel is a different category than domestic. I was just referring to domestic. It usually costs an order of magnitude more so there are still some decent perks associated with it.
Transcontinental flights often qualify when shorter ones would not. If your flight has lay-flat seats (I usually fly Delta, so think Delta One), your ticket for one of those will usually cover the lounges. Whereas a standard domestic first-class ticket does not.
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.
A 45L backpack ("personal item") and a 50L duffle bag (carry-on) give you a huge amount of space sufficient for pretty much any travels on the cheapest ticket.
I do this all the time on Alaska. I have the same Peak Design travel backpack as a sibling comment mentioned, plus an ordinary overhead roller suitcase. Maybe one in five times I have to gate-check the suitcase, but the rest of the time I have ~90L of space carried on and off the plane.
How is it inconsiderate? The suitcase goes in the overhead where I'm taking up no more space than any other passenger, the backpack fits under the seat in front of me. It squashes my legs a bit, but the only person getting inconvenienced there is myself.
1. You've literally described an overhead bag that exceeds the maximum allowable carry-on dimensions at pretty much every airline, so you're taking more than your share of overhead space.
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.
Every flight I've been on this year, except one, has demanded people check bags at the gate before Group 1 even finishes boarding.
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.
> Every flight I've been on this year, except one, has demanded people check bags at the gate before Group 1 even finishes boarding.
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.
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.
This is a good move anyway, as the overhead bins fill rapidly but you can always count on your under-seat space. And if you do find space overhead, you have a bit more room to stretch your legs with nothing filling in that space.
I usually travel with my wife & 3 kids, and ... yeah, none of those things will work. I might still be able to fit my youngest in that backpack, I don't think she could wear one (She might be a bit too big now).
The airline charges everyone else $50 per bag, $50 for selecting your seat, gives you $10 off for traveling with a backpack in a middle seat, and pockets $90 after costs. I'm glad you feel lucky about that.
There's even gems like "no carry ons" and "no airline miles" tickets now. They cost the same as the lowest fares last year.
> The airline charges everyone else $50 per bag, $50 for selecting your seat, gives you $10 off for traveling with a backpack in a middle seat, and pockets $90 after costs
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.
Budget airlines is Europe have figured out an evil approach to avoiding delays.
Airlines are eligible to pay compensation for delays longer than two hours. So they start boarding the aircraft 1.5 hrs after departure, close the doors at the 2 hour mark and then spend the next hours sitting on the tarmac while depriving the passengers of food and drink.
This strategy would save them having to issue food vouchers at the airport, but not delay compensation per se which is based on arrival time at the destination gate.
Or even worse, they load all the passengers into a bus and... just leave them there for an hour or so. And of course the buses are packed with most passengers standing.
The airlines tend to avoid paying compensation by making the whole processes as confusing as possible. What the rules actually say has less affect on the outcome than you might expect.
Air travel is a mixed bag. Inflight entertainment systems, free Wi-Fi (for at least messaging), better airports etc. try to reduce the hassle the system has introduced over the years. But also, the number of personal flights that are delayed by more than an hour was concerning in the recent days. The stipulated times were only a suggestion, and the real time depends pretty much on factors that almost nobody has any control on. The schedules for flights have become so tight that only a perfect world without inconsistencies can handle that dense a network. Throw in the climate change, and it is expected.
According to my own limited experience, yes, it is getting worse.
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.
There's something off about blaming mass availability and low prices for poor travel experiences.
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.
Not captured in numbers or the article, but I've noticed service becoming a lot poorer, though perhaps the downward trend has stopped for now. Between 2021-2024 or so, I encountered a lot of people working for airlines (gate agents, flight attendants, etc.) who really went out of their way to make me feel like they're doing me a favor by letting me fly on their plane.
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.
Flying before every country dropped covid restrictions was really just a degree of bliss that I'll never again attain in my life. Tickets at rock bottom prices, booking just one seat but having a full row to stretch out and sleep on, nobody in front of or behind me, meals being oddly good for some reason (maybe desperate to appeal to customers or not needing to make as many meals with little ingredients?). 2020-2023 was peak travel.
Economic inefficiency can feel really good. Personally experiencing tens of billions of dollars of capital investment designed for a capacity 50x as high, temporarily priced way below what it should be due to a market shock? Sign me up!
I’ll never forget going on a business trip where the restrictions were in place on the way there and had dropped by the time of my return flight.
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.
Less than half-full planes were very frequent prior to the big airline mergers in the 2010's. The loss of US Air, Contentintal, and Air Tran has completely ruined air travel. On most domestic flights, the middle seat was for children or unoccupied.
In my experience, there has been a wide-spread (across the retail and service economy) decline in how customer service personnel treat customers, and it seems like it might actually be deeper than that (extending throughout young people's attitudes towards their jobs).
Quite right, I'm sure. But the part that I'm more interested about is why it feels like the floor got so much lower? I don't know that the average interaction in public (in any context, not just flying) is any or substantially worse, but it seems like the variation to the downside got more extreme.
Young people feel (either really or they have been convinced) that employers don't care about them, pay them slave wages, and will generally abuse them so they feel the same way in return -- no loyalty, no care other than getting the next paycheck.
If you live that way, it may feel good in the short term but in the long term you just screw yourself over. Everything to you becomes transactional, and you miss out on benefits of being loyal to people who would reward loyalty. And you will never feel you are “owed” anything by anyone because you never did anything to warrant payback. Far less people will be good to you if you aren’t good to them.
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?
> In my experience, there has been a wide-spread (across the retail and service economy) decline in how customer service personnel treat customers
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.
Some people suck so much that the average works out to "suck".
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.
As a teenager, I worked at a big box store that figured out how to monetize this: The department I worked in had a blank on the pricing form marked "Hand Placement Fee" that our company trainer taught us to call the "PIA Charge"
We were instructed to upcharge customers for being jerks, and use our own judgement to determine the fee.
I suspect this is employee burnout from repeatedly seeing their coworkers laid off and being told to "do more with less."
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.
I was in Italy recently and got chatting to one of the airport employees. She said she'd been working in airlines/airports for 20 years and it was fucked as a career because wages were decreasing, hours increasing, shifts getting less predictable, career/permanent staff being replaced by agency workers/temps and she had run out of fucks to give.
As a career, working in aviation is extremely hierachical and seniority based. If you're old, chances are you started making an okay amount of money and now are making absolute bank. Years of collective agreements and contracts have seniority king. If you're a new employee though it seems to be really shitty. The system is entirely tipped against you.
This is one of the hot button topics, but I was surprised to see the (false) reference to the FAA having race and gender quotas.
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.
More padding seems like an improvement if you're trying to make a connection and don't want to miss it. This is true even though it will also result in more waiting for the next flight on average. Efficiency is at odds with reliability.
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 tricky tho cos Emirates B777 in Economy is not great so does depend on whether the route you're flying is guaranteed to have a A380. Flew them recently where one leg was A380 and the other B777, and could not be A380 for both legs.
I don't fly on widebody aircraft very often so I don't consider myself an expert, but long flights in B777 economy class with a 3-4-3 seat configuration shouldn't be legal
Oh yeah absolutely. All part of the research! Google Flights shows the aircraft type, which is useful (though of course the caveat is there can be substitutions on the day)
Southwest is a public company. Elliott Investment Management owns 11% of southwest. Elliot is a hedge fund, not private equity, but thats semantics. More importantly, Elliot purchased its position in direct response to the holiday meltdown in 2022. Im not a southwest flier, but it seems their problems started before the capital moved in.
Go read the union agreement between united american airlines pilots and united airlines if you want something infuriating.
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.
It's said here [0] that they make an average of $160,970 a year.
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.
> That's comfortable in most major American cities, but not rich.
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!
> 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.
My air fares in Europe ha stayed shockingly stable. My home base is in Vienna and my trips have stayed stable. Which is impressive if you consider inflation and energy prices.
We have no idea how much that CO2 will cost to remove since we don't have the technology, and that is assuming that we need to remove it, so I don't understand why you think that is "way too cheap"?
This is pretty funny. It's like a case study in the armchair expert. Here's a person who is not a travel industry veteran, but was curious about something, so they just started googling facts and figures, tried to find a trend, then looked for evidence to back up the trend they were looking for, then googled for "explanations" (read: news articles from mainstream media) to justify the trends they were looking for. At no time did they actually talk to somebody in the travel industry. Just a lot of googling, vague questions, and hand-wavey answers.
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.
With air travel, and most kinds of tourism, and customer service, and actually with most commodified experiences, the affordability and mass availability is the thing that makes the experience subjectively worse. It's the other people. Farting. Coughing. When you treat people like animals, they act like animals. At the same time, when they act like animals, why not treat them as such?
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.
Not necessarily. It isn't the amount of people that is causing your discomfort -- the airline is always going to optimize for a full plane (and environmentally, we should want them to). It is the fact that we have been taught to tolerate people when they are being obnoxious and discourteous. If the airlines just ejected people who were being an asshole and fellow travelers would call out and shame bad behavior, it might lead to a more pleasant experience.
The seats are also too small, at least for Western men (and increasingly for women too). I am quite tall and find flying an experience to be endured by gritting my teeth, but for taller and heavier people it is almost torture. I recently saw a man with half his leg in the aisle, taking up almost all the walking space. If you are unlucky enough to sit next to a very large man, a fairly common sight especially in the US, the entire flight becomes a series of small and large movements, squirming and twisting.
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.
Agreed. I feel like if they started ejecting obnoxious passengers mid-flight, people would straighten up *real* fast.
Yes. Now do public school classrooms.
I don't think so.
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.
The person you are replying to was alluding to the fact that 'ejecting' someone out of a plane that was flying would be a demonstration the crew's intolerance for obnoxiousness. In essence, if you don't behave you will be murdered. Seeing this happen to one passenger would almost certainly make everyone else on the flight quiet down and sit still.
I did appreciate the humor in someone taking my flippant comment about "ejecting passengers" quite so seriously. :)
It would make me make a mental note to not fly that airline again.
> so I have to yell at that mom to shut their kid up
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?
In my experience, the mother tends to be fairly mortified herself—and, generally being closer to the screamer than anyone else is, would certainly make it stop if she could.
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.
In my experience, the mother tends to be fairly good at tuning it out after months and years of non-stop screaming and screeching.
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.
Sometimes you simply cannot control a screaming child easily and the only way is to let them be for a while. If you don't understand it, you are really immature and need to learn some basics about human society.
Let's push it a little farther than a screaming child. Something the parent can control is their child hitting the back of my seat. The only time I've ever said something to a parent on a flight was when that was happening, and after several warning looks over my shoulder that the mother ignored. And what I did wasn't shout. I basically turned around and hissed at them to control their child. That stopped it without drawing any excessive attention.
> and the only way is to let them be for a while
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.
> Me and 80% of the people on the plane can’t stand the selfishness
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.
> If any airline ever proposes something like that, the backlash will be swift and massive.
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.
id pay triple to put you in the luggage compartment
I see you're new to the site. You can check out the "Guidelines" section in the footer. There's guidance on what makes for good quality comments.
In theory, yes, you could enforce better conduct (although this might harm the bottom line). But I also think that when you place people in cramped conditions, they inherently begin to behave more antisocially and become less amicable. For every inch of legroom or width you shave off a seat, I think there's a non-negligible amount of discomfort that leads to more annoyance, which in turn leads to worse behavior. At some point, some portion of the consumers do explode into outright hostility or madness, and the airlines mostly seem to be tuning their services to just above that point.
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.
It's not double the legroom, but "premium coach" is a thing. Coach size seats, business-class legroom.
Culture and behavior aren't strictly consequences of economics.
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)
> In my experience for example, people on flights outside of the US tend to be far more polite, amicable,
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".
Not really. Very crowded airports and tight seating makes whole flying experience worse than before. Nothing to do with obnoxious people.
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.
This too. All else being equal, if you doubled the price per flight and halved the number of passengers you crammed on a plane, you'd have less than half as many people flying and a lot fewer flights, hence a lot less pollution. My proof of this is that if it or equal value to double the price and halve the seats, some airline would be doing it.
You make great points above and here.
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.
Isn't that a broader societal thing? It feels like American culture has gotten more tolerant than it ever has, and we're all to patiently zip it while the person in front of us stands on the left side of the escalator we're trying to walk up, instead of the right like everyone else. Or someone is listening to Instagram feeds at full volume on the train as they flip through one stupidity after the other.
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.
This doesn’t explain why the flexible compartment in front of me, on the back of the seats, is either less usable than 10 years ago (ie too inflexible), or doesn’t exist at all on some flights (Hello, Ryanair).
I think it's about improving the turnaround on planes. When a plane lands, the crew has to get everyone out, clean the cabin, then get the next flight's passengers in -- all as quickly as possible. The shorter this turnaround, the more flights the plane can fly, and the more money the airline can make.
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.
Counter offer... the turnaround time is locked in, cargo unloading and refueling, but fewer tasks mean fewer crew members needed to perform those tasks in the given time. So rather than 5 cleaners descending on an arriving plane, they can put 2 or 3 on it and pocket the 2 salaries they are no longer paying.
Just an offer, I don't actually know the airlines' historical cleaning crew requirement number trends.
It might sound funny in a juvenile way, but it just takes the uncontrolled flatulence of one impolite passenger to make the flight experience miserable for all the others. I was recently on a long-ish flight of a few hours and there was a passenger, whom I could not locate, who every 15 minutes or so was freeing themselves of some poison. The misery of the experience is difficult to describe, but I am sure that many will have felt something similar. All it takes is one rude bully to turn what should be a miraculous experience, like flying ought to be, into a depressing one. Many parallels can be drawn.
What feels like a rude bully, could actually be someone with a terminal bowel cancer. And just as much as they could maybe find charcoal underpants, you could also bring a $5 R95 odor-eliminating mask on the plane. I'm not saying there aren't unavoidable terrible experiences, but most of the misery people in the developed world experience is a state of mind.
I am all for interpreting other people's behavior charitably, but I would consider the terminally ill passenger to be the exception rather than the rule.
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.
It's not about protection as much as finding ways to cope with things you don't like. People fart. It smells for a bit, but the smell (being a gas) will diffuse eventually. You can do other things to cope, like bring things to mask the smell, but you can also just... accept it. It's just a smell.
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.
Although seemingly enlightened, this is a terrible way to treat other people who don't respect your right to a normal existence.
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.
What are you going to do about it? The farting, for example. You gonna stick a cork up their butthole? No; you're just going to sit their in your seat and feel upset. Doesn't really matter if you have some imaginary right or not. You're just stewing in your own mental hell.
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.
If I see where it is coming from, I am certainly shaming them for being disgusting, impolite, vulgar, and disrespectful to other people. I am not afraid of being confrontational. If the confrontation escalates, verbally, of course, so be it.
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.
Believe it or not, I think some of this excessive flatulence can also be blamed on the airlines trying to save cost. And I don't just mean on the "short rib and pasta salad."
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.
Do you think he is choosing to fart? It's not a voluntary action
It is wrong to assume that it was a man. Second, yes, in the vast majority of cases, it is a voluntary action that should be frowned upon when performed in public. At least that is the case for me and the people I am familiar with and respect. In the comfort of their own homes or the middle of the vast prairie, they can pass gas on their companions or poor herbaceous plants as much as they want.
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.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Flatulence is as much voluntary as sneezing, sure you can try to hold it in but 1) it's not always possible and 2) it might actually be bad for you.
And for some people it can just start happening out of the blue in the wrong moment.
I'm sorry, but it seems like you're talking to a bot, some kind of artificial intelligence entity, or an alien who has never experienced the sensation of having gas in their stomach.
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.
He's not a bully, hell is other people and the phantom aerial farter speaks for all of us
This is why I fly with an N95 regardless of Covid risk lol
A paper mask cannot filter out gases.
Any mask with activated carbon[1] can filter basic odors. For more gases, get a chemical cartridge[2].
[1] https://www.homedepot.com/p/HDX-N95-Disposable-Respirator-3-... [2] https://www.homedepot.com/p/3M-OV-AG-P100-Professional-Multi...
The problem with air travel is it is too fast. Or at least it is presented as fast. This implies if something is unpleasant, it shouldn't be a big deal because you shouldn't be exposed to it for long.
The on the ground part of flying has certainly gotten worse (honourable mention to Brexit). Which for flights of modest length is actually the longest part of the process. People keep coming up with creative ways of making it more painful.
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?
Why does he need to talk to someone in the travel industry to evaluate the experience of traveling? Yes, we all agree with Louis CK that just being able to fly is a marvel. But it still sucks and it has gotten worse.
Mass availability, hilarious cheapness, and ease of access makes things worse, News at 11.
It is news because a lot of people intuitively don't get this point. Also they would not show at 11 as news would rather be promoting more travel instead of covering downsides.
We had cheap airfare and significantly better passenger accommodation 20 years ago. For the most part folks didn't act like assholes in public either. So yeah, things have gotten worse.
I was thinking 30 years ago. The response to 9/11 definitely made the flying experience worse in the US. Plus of course the gradual shrinking of seat space.
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.
For many people making something more accessible is the same thing as making it worse.
Amd yet their conclusion at the start seems to nail it?
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.
I remember flying coast to coast in the US in the 90s cheaper than I can get tickets today, but that's not accounting for inflation, so probably not really cheaper.
> Here's a person who is not a travel industry veteran, but was curious about something
> 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.
https://www.thebeliever.net/remote-control/
> Just a lot of googling
I'm not sure I've ever seen this as a pejorative for doing research to come up with sources for data before.
I agree with your broader point. But I used to get a free beer on British Airways flights and no longer do. It's been many years since I flew on a plane with even a compartment for my stuff in front of me let alone a screen. Admittedly I fly less than I used to but that's at least partly because the relative experience vs cost of trains has got better and I have no reason to fly across the ocean.
As if talking to travel industry experts is a sure way to quantify the subjective experience travelers? Sorry, I prefer the perspective of people and data that depend upon the travel industry indirectly, not as their cash cow.
The author explains clearly what his sources were, and it wasn’t Google. Did you even read the post?
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With the way they pack people into airplanes like sardines, most of the reason for why "air travel sucks" today is that too many others are doing it!
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 wonder how much of the increased schedule times are due to baggage fees? Here is my theory:
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-...
Carry on policy has triggered an arms race for passengers and carry on size. I usually just bring a small backpack because it’s convenient and I don’t want to lug two bags through the airport.
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.
Almost 45 years after my first flight, I still carry a backpack. The same one in fact, though its waterproofing is long gone.
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 need dire circumstances to travel with more than a backpack. Waiting for baggage claim drains my soul. Traveling with just a carry on means I can walk off the plane into a cab without further downtime.
I'm the opposite. I hate having to drag my lugguage around while I'm in the airport. I'm happy to wait for my baggage to be delivered. My life isn't so frantic that 10-15 minutes more is the end of the world.
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 most frequent flight lands at 11:50pm, and is often 30+ minutes late. The last thing I want is to spend my "down time" at 1am waiting 30+ minutes for my bag in an uncomfortable, loud, jarring space. I'd rather just take a backpack and already be in bed by the time my luggage would have shown up.
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.
I don't enjoy carrying my baggage around either, but I very much don't enjoy one extra line to stand in to check my bag, and after a long flight I very much don't enjoy having to wait even longer to get to my destination. It's not a matter of "downtime". I want to be to my hotel or house or whatever as soon as possible.
Due to airline status etc. I always have a free checked bag, but I never, ever use it.
I’m team checked luggage. When plane lands, everyone is rushing out of airport, but I causally walk, perhaps grab some coffee or snacks before heading to baggage claim. It helps me relax and get energized for the driving.
I took some equipment once so figured I’d check my bag at the same time as I hard to wait for baggage anyway
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.
It's 10-15 minutes if the airport you're landing at is functioning properly. I've waited for two hours for a bag before.
Same, also a backpack simply does not have enough room for any trip longer than a couple of days. By the time you add underwear for every day, shirts for every day, multiple pairs of pants, some pajamas, toiletries... you're at a carry-on at least, and it's not hard to fill a checked bag.
I've had a backpack for a trip that lasted more than a year. Yes, you cannot do this in all climates, but it's not impossible.
It's not the waiting at the end that kills me, it's the waiting at the start.
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.
I've had good luck waterproofing things with Nikwax. I've got a 20 year old Tom Bihn bag that I've applied it to as well as outdoor clothing and it's been great!
Can you share a photo of the backpack?
It's quite similar to this:
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.
Airlines should get more strict with regards to the overhead bin. Both with bag size and placement. Planes can probably fit a certain sized bag for everyone who brings one, but too many flyers seem to intentionally bring bigger bags or place them oddly so as not to share the space.
In other words, it's too time consuming for flight attendants to do it for customers. Why? Because it's too time consuming.
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.
Wow another issue that comes down to "Airplanes are packed with too many people"
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.
Or maybe someone 6 foot tall should just pay the more expensive ticket with larger leg room. Why should someone 5 foot tall pay for your comfort.
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.
Business class is 20x the price of economy (it should be no more than 4X and that should be taxpayer funded), isn't enough of the plane and is constantly sold out months before the flight on long flights.
"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.
I’m sat in premium economy now, with plenty of legroom (39” pitch I believe) and width (2-4-2 rather than 3-4-3). Feels similar to the first class seat ton cruise was in in the first mission impossible film. Except without the smoking, and far cheaper.
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
Business class should be taxpayer funded? I would love to hear the case for that.
I mean that air travel should be nationalized in general, with whatever losses come from offering subsidized business class (no more than 5X economy) being ate by the tax payer.
In the anglo speaking world, that might turn out to be the majority of passengers.
The only place I ever got well priced business class flights of anywhere near 9+ hours were Japanese airlines, so maybe it is just because we are too tall!
Don't forget figuring out a way to tie overhead bin space to assigned seats to keep "overhead bin pirates" from storing their carryons in the front of the plane when their seats are in the back...
I guess I’m one of your pirates. Especially when I notice that most of the bins are closed near the back, where my seat usually is, I’ll use the first open space that I see. Bonus is that I don’t have to maneuver my suitcase as far. Drawback is that I have to keep an eye on things during deboarding: once I had to chase down some idiot who exited the plane with my bag. Why do you believe that people are supposed to use the bins next to their seats?
Well, for one thing, on many planes the space above FC and whatever their premium economy class is called is specifically labeled for use of passengers seated in those areas. For another, it's just common courtesy. I get if you are boarding late and there are only a few available bins but in my experience the bins at the back fill last not first, so you really should have no problem storing your bag near your seat.
I often only take a backpack as well. And I feel just fine putting that in the overhead bin, since that's my only carry-on.
A bullet train holds 2x to 4x the passengers and loads in 2-5 minutes. I get they are very different. Those 2x to 4x passgeners load into 16 cars (so 16 doors). The baggage does not have to be stowed before take off nor do any cargo holds need to be loaded. The aisles are wider. Etc.
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.
Relevant "The Better Boarding Method Airlines Won't Use" by CGP Grey:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAHbLRjF0vo
The real limiting factor is the willingness of people to actually follow the system, which I think he mentions but doesn't examine much. It'd be interesting to see if any of the papers test the better systems to see how they fair with noncompliant passengers.
Using a rear door (in addition to the front) for entry and exit is unusual but not unheard of.
https://thepointsguy.com/news/why-the-american-airlines-shut...
Not a tarmac.
https://aerosavvy.com/aviation-terminology/
Or the loading chute thing that they use could just lead to more doors :)
My theory is that the increased turnaround times are due to the fact that people are too stupid to board a plane properly. And Airline staff is doing less about it than, say, 10 years ago, probably being afraid of social media shitstorms or whatever.
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.
I'm a _somewhat_ frequent flyer (5-8 trips a year). I've never experienced a plane being delayed by the time it take passengers to enter/exit the plane. I have, however, experienced delays because the baggage handlers are still loading the plane.
For that reason, I've never understood the obsession with loading the plane quickly.
I don't think the claim is that boarding causes flights to depart later than scheduled. Of course they plan for the time it takes to board. The claim is that, despite being predictable, it significantly increases the turn-around time for airplanes.
If they’re not done loading the plane, they don’t have to make an announcement about it because it’s self evident, whereas if everyone is sitting down and ready to go, they will let everyone know what the holdup is.
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've also been on flights where they asked us to hurry, and then we (flight attendants included) sat and waited for other things to be completed. Not saying that was what you experienced, of course! Nor am I complaining. My understanding is that gate attendants get penalized if they're the reason the plane is held up, so I understand why they'd play it safe and hurry people.
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)!
I've often have the opposite experience. I fly a LOT (4+ times per month) and I hear the bag doors close and watch the handlers drive their ramp away while people are still staggering on-board more than 1/2 the time.
At least watching videos of loading planes on YouTube, it is pretty clear why! It is one tiny cramped tunnel and a whole lot of suitcases.
A lot of pathology in air travel is related to the fact that people use aggregate search engines to find flights and sort by price. The lowest up-front base fare tends to win. So that encourages airlines to nickel and dime later, such as by charging for bags and a million other things, making the whole experience worse.
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.
I agree 100% and when I encounter people that don't believe this theory I point out that, once upon a time, Southwest Airlines used to be able to turn an entire 737 in 10 minutes.
https://southwest50.com/our-stories/a-turning-point-the-birt...
I agree, but it's worth noting that those 10 minute turns were probably -100 or -200 series aircraft with a capacity of about 100 passengers, while a modern Max-8/9/10 aircraft holds about 200 (who still board through a single door).
Still, 20 minute turns would be industry-leading.
Is it possible this has anything to do with cheaper tickets and more amateur flyers? There are always some families new to flying that seem to gum up the works.
If that were the case I don’t think Southwest would ever have been record holders in turnaround time. Their tickets have historically been cheaper than many competitors.
The one advantage SW has is the open seating. People will naturally disperse along the length of the plane so as to avoid the middle seat. This could prevent many traffic jams that otherwise slow boarding with the rest of the passengers stuck behind a slow loader.
Not sure if it would actually make an impact -you will still get blockages. Would need a queuing theorist to comment.
We did SW once and never again. Some things we learned the hard way having never flown SW before: You have to pay extra if you don't want to be dead last on the plane, and evidently, everyone pays extra, because we were dead last. Not sitting together for sure (you have to pay extra for that too). So we finally get on the plane, and all the carry on space is already used up. We ask the flight attendant "so what now" and she just shrugs like it's my problem. I tell her OK we'll just leave the bags in the aisle then, or will you gate check them for us? Finally, she huffs and proceeds to open every overhead bin one by one until we find two of them with small backpacks that we have to yank down and convince the owners to stick under the seat in front of them. All the while the rest of the passengers are looking at us like we're preventing their ambulance from getting to the hospital.
No thanks. I'll take a slower boarding with a traditional airline that doesn't make their passengers feel like a burden.
You do not have to pay to get your seat order. The order in which people check in to the flight determines seating priority.
While true, in summer travel season more than half the plane will board early when SW allows families with small children to board between groups A and B. There's no real definition of small child and SW will let a party of 8 board early because one of them is 4 years old. Mom, Dad, teenage kids, grandma...etc.
You really do need to pay for A boarding if you must sit together. Or game the system and claim you need to preboard.
SWA is phasing in assigned seating and will be fully cutover by this coming February.
... and because of activist investors, they're throwing that away.
It's insane how Southwest is willing to throw away a unique competitive edge that nobody else has, and their loyal customer base with it. It's also insane that the activist investors pressured them to do something that stupid. In one stroke Southwest went from being an airline worth going out of your way to fly, to just another airline which has to compete on price alone. Absolutely boneheaded move.
I intentionally chose Southwest for my last flight because the old policies -- included bags and free-form seating-- made me feel better about the experience. I didn't need the free checked bags, but I appreciated not being pressured into guessing exactly how many pairs of pants I'm going to need for a trip I booked 3 months in advance.
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.
The number of SWA customers who needed wheelchairs to board (earlier than able-bodied pax) and were healed enough mid-flight to be able to walk off at the destination was astounding. It’ll be sad to lose all those miraculous recoveries.
For those not familiar with Southwest Airlines, they famously offered two free checked bags for years after all other major carriers started charging for them. Sadly, they ended that practice earlier this year.
Southwest Airlines was purchased by an activist investor.
https://www.wfaa.com/article/money/business/southwest-airlin...
So SWA will no longer have any features that distinguish them from other airlines? Guess my tax dollars will be bailing them out in a few years.
They also didn't have assigned seats and you could seat wherever you liked, right?
The article itself shows why scheduled times grew: so that airlines could report a very high percentage of on-time flights, which have regulatory and marketing advantages that they did not before.
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.
Average passenger circumference has also increased.
I too subscribe to the Anthropogenic Waistband Change model.
A very high percentage of on-time flights is an actual good thing and not just a reporting trick, even if all you have to change to achieve it is the reporting.
Honestly I'd love to check bags more often, but it's too frequently an inordinately slow and risky proposition.
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.
> And if they feel like they really want to be evil, switch the fees to carryons.
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.
They need to be weighing the passenger with the bag.
United already charges for carryons (the basic-economy fare only includes items small enough to fit under the seat), and if you bring one they charge you more than the checked bag fee to gate-check it.
I like it better this way so I don’t have to stand in line and try to get on the flight early enough to not get my carry-on gate-checked anyways.
Sometimes there isn’t even enough space in the cabin for all carry-ons, so you have to leave yours with a baggage handler in front of the plane.
I also experienced recently that gate agents will lie about this to decrease turn around time if a plane is running late. We were forced to gate check ours after being told the plane was too full to hold all, only to get onboard and find ample space. When we asked the flight attendant, they apologized and said they did not tell them to do this, but it’s unfortunately common at airports with frequent delays. So charge ridiculous bag fees, forcing everyone to carry on, which delays boarding, so they lie to you and check your bag for free (which maybe you would’ve done to begin with if that was an option), only to board a plane and feel duped. All around great experience!
Very often.
And I assume that adds a bunch of time to the boarding process as well. Generally no bag fees if they have to check those, either.
> I've long contended that airlines should get rid of checked bag fees.
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.
The budget carriers in Europe (RyanAir, EasyJet, etc) all have fees for carry on bags that are almost as high as checked bags and they only even offer those fees to people who have purchased the “up front” premium seats.
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.
I fully agree and practically anyone should have seen this coming a mile away.
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.
How would they charge for carryons though? Would they charge for say a bag of food you just bought? Also they'd have to put in infrastructure for charging right at the gate, and I'd imagine that would further slow things down, require more staff etc. Just don't think either thing will happen, since clearly they care a lot more about making money than passenger convenience.
Ryanair already does this in the UK and Frontier does it in the US, so clearly someone has figured out the logistics of it. Both are ultra-low cost carriers (in the same model as Southwest used to be).
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.
For the record, As a carry-on lover and cheapskate, I viscerally dislike this idea. But your logistical objections don't ring true to me.
> 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.
Spirit already does this. You need a special ticket to be allowed to carry on more than a personal item. I've seen people stopped and forced to pay an exorbitant punishment fee to take on a bag when they hadn't purchased a carry on in advance.
The budget airlines have all started getting very strict with carry ons. If your ticket has not paid for the larger carry on size they make you put your bag in the sizing basket and dont let you on if it doesnt fit. There is also a smaller basket for the personal item so you cant just bring a ton of food bags.
They already have the "infrastructure" to prevent one person from bringing on two carry-ons or a carry-on that exceeds the size requirements. I'm not sure what new thing you're imagining they would need.
you're currently allowed a carry-on and a "personal item" like a purse or a small backpack. the carry-on can be stowed, but the personal item has to stay with you in the seat.
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.
I should be entitled to the same amount of space, carry-on space and under seat space, as every other passenger paying for the same class of ticket.
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.
Carry-on luggage is transported for free; checked luggage requires paid ground personnel.
Anecdotally, Southwest flights now take much longer to board because of the stupid checked luggage fee they just introduced.
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.
> 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.
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 tend to board Group 5 and have had only one flight in the past three years where I wasn't able to put my bag in the bin in my row. That flight was one where they decided to force gate checking before the bins were even half full. Lots of disgruntled passengers then.
Southwest got taken over by private equity. That always results in enshittification.
Carry on luggage should just be banned. If it can't fit in your lap the whole flight it's not a valid carry on.
This is really a safety issue. And tbf, you don't need more. I've traveled internationally with just a laptop bag.
Airlines have either lost my checked bag or just stolen from it too many times for me to trust them with my possessions again. Maybe if I was transporting horse manure, or unpackaged glitter.
Every single statistic I’ve seen shows that lost luggage happens around 1% of the time. We fly fairly frequently - on average more than once per month and it’s really not something we think about.
1% means it happens to 2-3 people per flight.
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%
It also means that if you fly every week of the year it will likely only happen to you once all year. For the average traveler, it will be more like once in their entire lifetime.
Still sucks when it does happen though.
1% of losing my stuff is very high imho, I wouldn't want to put anything actually important through such a risk.
There is absolutely nothing in my checked bag that would be any more than a minor annoyance if it were lost.
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.
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You ever try to mail something to or from a developing or semi developed country? You'll be lucky if you ever see it again, let alone have to deal with import controls.
With every lithium-ion battery needing to go in carryon, and everything in the world having a lithium ion battery, this simply isn't reasonable.
I can't even put my toothbrush in a checked bag anymore.
Is this true? Granted I usually just deal with using a standard toothbrush when I go on vacation but I have absolutely put my electric shaver and electric toothbrush in my checked bag without issue.
I thought there is now a battery size allowance that allows these to go under the plane.
You can put the toothbrush in your laptop bag. Although I don't know why you're buying toothbrushes with lithium batteries in them. Even if electric toothbrushes made sense that's still a waste of money compared to the disposable ones.
Electric Toothbrush: $70
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.
Having a bag in your lap is a safety issue.
This is honestly why I love flying on spirit. No one has a carry-on bag so you just quickly board and de board at the end.
In May, Newark airport flights were on time 49% of the time: https://www.transtats.bts.gov/ot_delay/OT_DelayCause1.asp?20...
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.
Perhaps the free market is solving the pricing/timeliness problem, but your fellow travelers value lower prices more than being on time?
The people with more disposable income who are subsidizing air travel for the rest of us are giving us an even larger subsidy these days? I feel just terrible about that.It’s not that simple. Business is representing an ever increasing % of travellers, so airlines are increasing the % of business class seating, leaving fewer seats for economy seating and therefore less availability in economy, so you might not even end up seeing the savings in your flight ticket since more economy passengers are competing with each other.
They're degrading economy to the point where people feel like they have to upgrade. I'm not that tall or large but I can no longer tolerate American's economy seating, my knees are jammed into the seat in front of me before they recline, it's down right painful if they choose to recline.
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
If this was true they would raise economy prices.
> Business is representing an ever increasing % of travellers
Is it? I thought that trend reversed in 2020.
I’m not sure you can accurately track any airline-related trend through the years 2021-2023, for obvious reasons.
It’s not people buying first class most of the time. It’s business travelers getting reimbursed.
>The people with more disposable income
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.
Every time I've flown First/Business class, it's been out of my own pocket. Every time I've had my employer pay for a flight, it's been in cattle class.
Now I'm wondering what percentage of people in First/Business class are paying for the flight themselves.
My current employer lets me expense flights so that I book in First and they pay what it would have cost in cattle. Might be worth it?
Otoh, I have minor elite status and have gotten upgraded to cattle plus the last couple flights which might be nice enough.
I fly frequently on average more than once a month and I really don’t see the benefit of first class for domestic flights. I am short though. I’m good with exit row seats.
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).
Domestic at least, I expect a lot is upgrades for status travelers (who have flown a lot of it on company expense accounts). At least that's my experience.
In semi-retirement, I probably do need to burn down my points though.
I think the average flyer can be pretty confident that they're saving more on the flight than the incremental addition to their grocery bills attributable to company executives' flight costs...
YUP! As usual HN downvotes the truth! I have NEVER seen a business who is willing to let people actually travel in business class outside of the C suite and even then I've seen them refuse it for C suite!!!
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.
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> 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.
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.
> I also hate the argument that the free market should solve the pricing problem.
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
> 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
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.
Pilot here:
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.
They're real and tracked, but they're also not the main reason why airlines aren't on time, or any sort of reason for lower cruise speeds.
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...
The author did not claim that the entire or the main reason for longer flight times was ATC delays. He wouldn’t be dead wrong if he had made that claim since as you note, ATC delays are higher than they were in the 90s. But he didn’t make the claim that ATC was the full and only cause of delays.
His conclusion is that there are a multitude of causes, among them, ATC staffing delays.
The author explicitly dismissed the idea of "greedy airlines" as not passing his "sniff test" whilst the data shows their own actions are a more frequent culprit for delays than aviation services (be they ATC shortages or congestion, which combined only account for <20% of the delays; unlikely to cause of a fourfold increase in long delays by themselves never mind be a reason for slower cruising speeds).
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.
Lower speeds to save on fuel as closing on sound barrier has somewhat sharp increase in air resistance.
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.
ATC shortage delays are very common and the big ones get reported on nationally.
What happens is typically that they hold you on the ground or at the gate until they can appropriately release your flight plan.
> but every single flight I’ve taken this year has been delayed
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
Every flight I have taken in the last 5 years in Canada has been delayed. They simply cannot run any of the routes on time.
Why does Alaska schedule more flights than they have gate slots? Or is it just that anything that delays gate availability is going to impact them first?
> Business class prices on tickets have skyrocketed, way outstripping purported CPI.
Because business class is a luxury?
Why cherrypick Newark?
Why cherrypick May?
May also happens to be the month construction began on one of EWR’s two commonly used runways (though they do have a smaller third runway). This severely reduced the amount of traffic the airport could handle and EWR attempted to keep operating the same amount of scheduled flights as usual, it was a real mess.
may is the latest data currently available.
How have we not solved the issue of getting everyones baggage off the plane in a timely manner. We've been using these conveyor belt-carousels for over 50 years and the same process for loading and unloading, but people shouldnt have to plan on waiting 45+ minutes after they deplane for their personal belongings in 2025. Lost luggage? The whole system seems archaic to me.
If you think about the complexity of routing bags from a single plane on to potentially dozens of connecting flights and onto the non-connecting carousel, it's actually amazing that the process is not screwed up more frequently.
I mean the bags have barcodes with their destination on them.
Of course, but no one is taking the bag physically so its destination. They're putting them on moving pathways that are matched to ever-changing information about gates, flight numbers, etc.
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.
Alaska guarantees bags within 20m of landing. It’s not impossible, most airlines just don’t give a shit because people tend to mentally blame the airport not the airline for baggage experience issues.
Great analysis! a couple of comments:
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 will say I've been on a number of flights that left late but arrived early/on-time. I think they build a pad into flight time and/or give up fuel efficiency to make up time.
There was an article posted to HN recently (today, even!) that showed how airlines do pad their flight times deliberately.
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.
Airfare alone isn’t a great indicator of price, since airlines have been reducing benefits—luggage generally is an upcharge now, whereas it used to be built into the ticket price.
They are very guilty of shrinkflation in general. For example, first class used to get you access to the airport lounges. Now you need a very expensive subscription of some sort to get access.
Lounges have gotten significantly worse since Covid though with overcrowding issues (with some exceptions like KIX), so I don’t think it’s a particularly great loss. My card lets me pay some token amount to gain access to lounges but I’d rather spend that money to get an actual meal cooked for me rather than a buffet and then sit in a quiet corner of the terminal than a crowded lounge.
So basically grass is not green at all. This side or other side.
Dragonpass can be relatively cheap if you get it through e.g. a credit card and you fly more than once a month.
This varies: a family member of mine flew cross-country a few weeks ago first class (on the company's dime) and was given automatic access to the lounges there.
International first class / business class travel is a different category than domestic. I was just referring to domestic. It usually costs an order of magnitude more so there are still some decent perks associated with it.
...And I would have hoped that by "cross-country" it could be understood that this flight was, in fact, domestic?
Transcontinental flights often qualify when shorter ones would not. If your flight has lay-flat seats (I usually fly Delta, so think Delta One), your ticket for one of those will usually cover the lounges. Whereas a standard domestic first-class ticket does not.
i am in agreement with you.
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.
They often are not; you happen to be on a very competitive route. A round trip first-class ticket from my home to a hub is about $800.
good point.
Misread, apologies.
I'm lucky I'm able to travel with just a backpack.
A 45L backpack ("personal item") and a 50L duffle bag (carry-on) give you a huge amount of space sufficient for pretty much any travels on the cheapest ticket.
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.
I'm not aware of any airline where a 50L + 45L bag together are legally allowed as carry-on + personal item.
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.
I do this all the time on Alaska. I have the same Peak Design travel backpack as a sibling comment mentioned, plus an ordinary overhead roller suitcase. Maybe one in five times I have to gate-check the suitcase, but the rest of the time I have ~90L of space carried on and off the plane.
Yeah, I mean, you can probably get away with it much of the time, but it's pretty inconsiderate to other passengers. Tragedy of the commons.
How is it inconsiderate? The suitcase goes in the overhead where I'm taking up no more space than any other passenger, the backpack fits under the seat in front of me. It squashes my legs a bit, but the only person getting inconvenienced there is myself.
1. You've literally described an overhead bag that exceeds the maximum allowable carry-on dimensions at pretty much every airline, so you're taking more than your share of overhead space.
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.
Yeah thats because the stewards dont care. Ive been on flights that were delayed because someone like you ignored the regs.
Every flight I've been on this year, except one, has demanded people check bags at the gate before Group 1 even finishes boarding.
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.
> Every flight I've been on this year, except one, has demanded people check bags at the gate before Group 1 even finishes boarding.
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.
Wow, that's annoying.
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.
This is a good move anyway, as the overhead bins fill rapidly but you can always count on your under-seat space. And if you do find space overhead, you have a bit more room to stretch your legs with nothing filling in that space.
I don't think most airlines allow two suitcases. Generally it's one "bag" (a suitcase or duffel) and one "personal item" (purse, backpack, etc.).
Most people I saw had a hardshell suitcase, and then a softer personal item they could kick under the seat.
FYI CabinZero has essentially the same design philosophy and you can often find their 44l backpack for $50: http://cabinzero.com
I've mine daily for 5-10 years, they're great.
I usually travel with my wife & 3 kids, and ... yeah, none of those things will work. I might still be able to fit my youngest in that backpack, I don't think she could wear one (She might be a bit too big now).
The airline charges everyone else $50 per bag, $50 for selecting your seat, gives you $10 off for traveling with a backpack in a middle seat, and pockets $90 after costs. I'm glad you feel lucky about that.
There's even gems like "no carry ons" and "no airline miles" tickets now. They cost the same as the lowest fares last year.
> The airline charges everyone else $50 per bag, $50 for selecting your seat, gives you $10 off for traveling with a backpack in a middle seat, and pockets $90 after costs
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.
As they say, "if you want to be a millionaire, start with a billion dollars and launch a new airline."
Huh? If you're traveling with a backpack (personal item) in a middle seat you're not paying the $50 for a carry-on or the $50 to select a seat.
Updated my comment
Some European companies make you pay for that too and the basic package only comes with a bag (e.g. laptop bag)
Budget airlines is Europe have figured out an evil approach to avoiding delays. Airlines are eligible to pay compensation for delays longer than two hours. So they start boarding the aircraft 1.5 hrs after departure, close the doors at the 2 hour mark and then spend the next hours sitting on the tarmac while depriving the passengers of food and drink.
This strategy would save them having to issue food vouchers at the airport, but not delay compensation per se which is based on arrival time at the destination gate.
Or even worse, they load all the passengers into a bus and... just leave them there for an hour or so. And of course the buses are packed with most passengers standing.
Seems simple enough to stop that - start requiring compensation to be paid based on takeoff time.
The airlines tend to avoid paying compensation by making the whole processes as confusing as possible. What the rules actually say has less affect on the outcome than you might expect.
Shouldn’t it be based on arrival time?
It is
Air travel is a mixed bag. Inflight entertainment systems, free Wi-Fi (for at least messaging), better airports etc. try to reduce the hassle the system has introduced over the years. But also, the number of personal flights that are delayed by more than an hour was concerning in the recent days. The stipulated times were only a suggestion, and the real time depends pretty much on factors that almost nobody has any control on. The schedules for flights have become so tight that only a perfect world without inconsistencies can handle that dense a network. Throw in the climate change, and it is expected.
>Air travel is a mixed bag.
I stopped flying twenty five years ago. I think it's one of the better decisions I've made.
> Air travel is a mixed bag.
Oops, that's gonna cost you extra.
According to my own limited experience, yes, it is getting worse.
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.
There's something off about blaming mass availability and low prices for poor travel experiences.
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.
Not captured in numbers or the article, but I've noticed service becoming a lot poorer, though perhaps the downward trend has stopped for now. Between 2021-2024 or so, I encountered a lot of people working for airlines (gate agents, flight attendants, etc.) who really went out of their way to make me feel like they're doing me a favor by letting me fly on their plane.
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.
Flying before every country dropped covid restrictions was really just a degree of bliss that I'll never again attain in my life. Tickets at rock bottom prices, booking just one seat but having a full row to stretch out and sleep on, nobody in front of or behind me, meals being oddly good for some reason (maybe desperate to appeal to customers or not needing to make as many meals with little ingredients?). 2020-2023 was peak travel.
Economic inefficiency can feel really good. Personally experiencing tens of billions of dollars of capital investment designed for a capacity 50x as high, temporarily priced way below what it should be due to a market shock? Sign me up!
I’ll never forget going on a business trip where the restrictions were in place on the way there and had dropped by the time of my return flight.
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.
Less than half-full planes were very frequent prior to the big airline mergers in the 2010's. The loss of US Air, Contentintal, and Air Tran has completely ruined air travel. On most domestic flights, the middle seat was for children or unoccupied.
In my experience, there has been a wide-spread (across the retail and service economy) decline in how customer service personnel treat customers, and it seems like it might actually be deeper than that (extending throughout young people's attitudes towards their jobs).
In my experience, there has been a widespread decline in how customers treat service personnel.
There is just a widespread kindness gap in our society.
Quite right, I'm sure. But the part that I'm more interested about is why it feels like the floor got so much lower? I don't know that the average interaction in public (in any context, not just flying) is any or substantially worse, but it seems like the variation to the downside got more extreme.
Young people feel (either really or they have been convinced) that employers don't care about them, pay them slave wages, and will generally abuse them so they feel the same way in return -- no loyalty, no care other than getting the next paycheck.
If you live that way, it may feel good in the short term but in the long term you just screw yourself over. Everything to you becomes transactional, and you miss out on benefits of being loyal to people who would reward loyalty. And you will never feel you are “owed” anything by anyone because you never did anything to warrant payback. Far less people will be good to you if you aren’t good to them.
I wish young people knew this, but they will find out too late in life.
> Everything to you becomes transactional
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?
> In my experience, there has been a wide-spread (across the retail and service economy) decline in how customer service personnel treat customers
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.
some "People suck."
Some people suck so much that the average works out to "suck".
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.
As a teenager, I worked at a big box store that figured out how to monetize this: The department I worked in had a blank on the pricing form marked "Hand Placement Fee" that our company trainer taught us to call the "PIA Charge"
We were instructed to upcharge customers for being jerks, and use our own judgement to determine the fee.
I suspect this is employee burnout from repeatedly seeing their coworkers laid off and being told to "do more with less."
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.
I was in Italy recently and got chatting to one of the airport employees. She said she'd been working in airlines/airports for 20 years and it was fucked as a career because wages were decreasing, hours increasing, shifts getting less predictable, career/permanent staff being replaced by agency workers/temps and she had run out of fucks to give.
As a career, working in aviation is extremely hierachical and seniority based. If you're old, chances are you started making an okay amount of money and now are making absolute bank. Years of collective agreements and contracts have seniority king. If you're a new employee though it seems to be really shitty. The system is entirely tipped against you.
At least the comments there are better than the article
Interesting analysis.
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.
I am really curious about the sinusoidal delay graph. It seems like average flight times rise and fall once a year.
Is it summer travel then holiday travel then a winter spring slump? That would support the author's hypothesis that congestion is to blame.
How anyone could seriously doubt that the answer is 'yes' is beyond me. I mean aside from people who just don't fly much.
Glad a question in a title wasn't a clear no. In this case its maybe, it is in the eye of the beholder, choose your own adventure.
It should get worse, Covid shocked the system and we know from perturbation theory how long the shock will take to ripple through time.
But we bailed them out during covid
This is one of the hot button topics, but I was surprised to see the (false) reference to the FAA having race and gender quotas.
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.
More padding seems like an improvement if you're trying to make a connection and don't want to miss it. This is true even though it will also result in more waiting for the next flight on average. Efficiency is at odds with reliability.
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.
I you’re going to treat me like cargo, bill me like freight.
air travel is getting better, people just don't put in effort to learn how to do it
it's like picking the cheapest restaurant every time and complaining you get crap food
you have to research which restaurant to go to
I agree long haul. Eg choosing Emirates A380 in Economy
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.
It's tricky tho cos Emirates B777 in Economy is not great so does depend on whether the route you're flying is guaranteed to have a A380. Flew them recently where one leg was A380 and the other B777, and could not be A380 for both legs.
I don't fly on widebody aircraft very often so I don't consider myself an expert, but long flights in B777 economy class with a 3-4-3 seat configuration shouldn't be legal
Haha totally agree! The move to 3-4-3 on the 777 was a pivotal moment of the enshittificafion of air travel IIRC
Oh yeah absolutely. All part of the research! Google Flights shows the aircraft type, which is useful (though of course the caveat is there can be substitutions on the day)
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private equity combined with regulatory capture
Which airlines are owned by private equity?
southwest
Southwest is a public company. Elliott Investment Management owns 11% of southwest. Elliot is a hedge fund, not private equity, but thats semantics. More importantly, Elliot purchased its position in direct response to the holiday meltdown in 2022. Im not a southwest flier, but it seems their problems started before the capital moved in.
Go read the union agreement between united american airlines pilots and united airlines if you want something infuriating.
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.
It's said here [0] that they make an average of $160,970 a year.
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...
> That's comfortable in most major American cities, but not rich.
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!
> 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.
And to get to that 160k spot they spent years further down the chain working bad routes for much worse pay
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If put to the test, who would be faster on HN at jumping "out right on queue" The union drone or the engagement bot?
Good news - you too can become a pilot, get rich, and stop complaining on the internet!
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.
> Is Air Travel Getting Worse? More delays, fewer accidents, and lower prices
Lower prices ? Where ? In EU surely not.
My air fares in Europe ha stayed shockingly stable. My home base is in Vienna and my trips have stayed stable. Which is impressive if you consider inflation and energy prices.
Like for like (baggage etc)? Or have you accepted less - packed less etc?
Way too cheap. A flight from London to Rome is CAD150. That doesn't even cover the 100kg CO2 that flight emits.
The current price of 100kg of CO2 credits is about 7 euros.
We have no idea how much that CO2 will cost to remove since we don't have the technology, and that is assuming that we need to remove it, so I don't understand why you think that is "way too cheap"?
> and that is assuming that we need to remove it
Do you think there is no man-made climate change?
I agree with you. My flights back home cost double now than they did 5 years ago.