EDIT: BTW, I’m a huge public transit user and I really wish it was more prolific. I’m just hopeful that the heroes driving those buses and trains stay safe.
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Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
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Who suggested that? Why would that happen?
The original proposition was take out a load of seats and improve the food (and, dare I add, improve a lot of other service aspects).
So prices would have to go up. If the FAA or some legal constraint forced a minimum seat size and distance, then a competitive market would still apply (well, as competitive as today’s market).
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I’m a tall dude. 6’ 6’’ is NOT fun when you’re on a plane. Middle seat? Pffft. What I don’t get is the food thing. If you’re going on an international flight for over 8 hours, then I understand…kind of. If you’re flying 5 hours from point A to point B, then bring a sandwich, some trail mix and a water bottle. And enough treats to keep the kids happy if they don’t want blue potato chips. Then the flight attendants don’t have to cart up the aisle passing out spillable coffee, prices go down, time to refill the aircraft means quicker turnaround, etc.
You’re not on a flying restaurant. Bring a snack and chill out.
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Up to a point. Free tea and coffee and soft drinks on demand, and a decent range of on board snacks to choose from (or buy) would be nice.
It’s also going to be a lot more expensive. Which, ok, you’re paying the real price. It doesn’t affect wealthy people much and probably won’t hurt the business traveller since companies will pay what they have to. But it’s going to shut out a lot of working- and middle-class people from travelling and turn seeing distant family and new places back into a luxury (seriously – I remember my family and I dressing up for flights when I was a child).
The TSA definitely needs to go. What a waste of time and money.
Guilty as charged, at least on flights under 7 hours. I just count on getting lucky with an empty seat near me, which has usually been a 50-50 proposition on the routes I travel.
Amen. They’ll usually feed you a small meal as part of the ticket price for one of those 8-hour-plus flights, but bringing a water bottle, a sandwich, and something to munch on any flight over 3-hours is the only way to go.
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This.
Also, a large majority of the flights I take are for work. An executive can get away with “I need to book a more expensive ticket b/c it’s direct, and I can buy business class when I want to, because I need to arrive and be ready to work” but I don’t have nearly that much freedom to voluntarily pay more. The way around a race to the bottom is coordinated simultaneous action by every airline, aka re-regulation.
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United Airlines lost $1.6 billion in the second quarter of 2020. This is in sharp contrast to its profit of $1 billion during the second quarter of 2019.
The problem with phrasing it that way is that it doesn’t consider the tax implications since lovely tax reform. You see, now that United has lost its 1 billion it can now take the loss back in time, and get a refund for all the taxes that it paid on the previous 1.6 billion in profit (which is now only 0.6 billion in profit).
It’s good to be a corporation, even when losing money…
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Plus the wad of CARES Act bail out monies they pocketed followed by immediate layoffs.
Airlines are evil.
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I’m willing to fully indemnify the airlines against all injury in exchange for being loaded aboard in my own coffin-sized hermetically-sealed “transport pod”.
And I’d pay extra to be jettisoned over my destination with my parachute-equipped upgrade. Christ, if SpaceX can gently land a nosecone fairing on a ship, I can be deposited in a farmer’s field a kilometre from home.
We need two tiers of travel - budget and luxury. Cheap seats and bring or buy everything separately, and expensive fully reclining seats with drinks, food, and amenities built in to the price. Like the olden days, except at budget level there’s a wide and/or tall section.
Agreed.
And what ever happened to high-speed passenger rail?
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Any bailout for the airlines had better have a lot of conditions in terms of passengers’ rights. It is embarrassing that legacy carriers in the US have worse service across the board than even the cheapest LCCs in Asia.
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This point is so under-appreciated when people long for “the good old days” of flying (the parts that aren’t fauxstalgia anyway). It was only upper class white people on those planes. Growing up, we took a plane exactly once, any my parents had to save up a long time for it. It was a really big deal for us to afford that. Otherwise we lived our entire lives within a six hour drive of where I was born. 30 years later, my whole family flies all the time and the low prices opened up all kinds of career and family options for us all over the world.
Deregulation of the airlines did a lot of bad things, but the drop in prices was very democratizing.
Also fuck the TSA and bullshit security theater.
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Is that not exactly what we have in today’s airlines? Flights over 5 hours have pretty much standardized on an economy cabin with cramped rows of seats and minimal amenities, a subset of the economy cabin with a little bit more space for a small upcharge, and a business class cabin with full service and seats that transform into bunks for 2-5x the cost (which makes sense considering the drastically lower density of that cabin).
Amen. You want the good old days of air travel? Buy a business class ticket. But let’s not restrict the miracle of being able to travel between continents in a day to only those who can afford to pay the price of a used car for the experience.
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