In response to criticisms about cramped planes, poor service, and hidden fees, commercial airline pilot and ask-a-pilot author Patrick Smith opines in the New York Times that there really was no golden age of air travel. “Yes, things were once a little more comfortable,” he says, but air travel costs only half as much today as it did 35 years ago. This is conservative: using the consumer price index, the average fare per passenger mile was 32.5 cents in 1980 compared with 14.2 cents in 2013, the latest year for which data are available.
Moreover, Smith says, more planes go more places with fewer stopovers shortening overall travel times. So even though there’s a little less legroom (“but only slightly”), travel times are shorter. He concludes by asking, “Do you really want to travel like people did in the 1960s? Are you sure?”
In the same way people nostalgically recall a golden age of air travel, many nostalgically think back to a supposed golden age of rail travel. Yet this was so long ago–roughly 1895 to 1925–that few people alive can really remember it. The nostalgia buffs remember that there were 9,000 intercity trains a day in 1920. What they forget is that those trains were expensive, slow, and uncomfortable. We can somewhat remedy the latter two problems today, but only by making them even more expensive. Continue reading
