Flying Used to Be a Luxury Event. Now It's a Bus With Wings. Was That a Good Trade?

In 1955, flying from New York to Los Angeles cost around $160 round trip. That sounds cheap until you realize the average American worker earned roughly $75 a week. You were looking at more than two full weeks of salary just to get across the country and back.

Air travel was not for everyone. It was for business executives, the wealthy, and the occasional lucky middle-class family treating themselves to something extraordinary. You dressed for it. The airline dressed for it. The whole experience was wrapped in a kind of occasion-ness that made flying feel genuinely special.

Today you can book a round-trip flight from JFK to LAX for $180 on a Tuesday morning without thinking twice. Adjusting for inflation, that's roughly 80–85% cheaper than that 1955 fare. More Americans flew in a single month in 2023 than flew in an entire year in the mid-1960s.

That is, by any reasonable measure, a staggering achievement. So why does flying feel so miserable?

The World Before Deregulation

To understand what changed, you have to understand how the airline industry was structured before 1978.

The Civil Aeronautics Board — the CAB — controlled virtually every commercial aspect of domestic air travel. It set ticket prices. It assigned routes. It decided which airlines could fly where and for how much. Airlines competed on service, amenities, and on-time performance because price competition wasn't allowed. They were essentially regulated utilities.

The result was an industry that catered extravagantly to its passengers. Meals were multi-course affairs served on real china with actual silverware. Seats were wide. Legroom was generous by any standard. Flight attendants — then almost exclusively called stewardesses — were famously attentive and immaculately presented. Flying Pan Am across the country in 1965 was closer to dining at a nice restaurant than anything you'd associate with modern air travel.

It was also, obviously, wildly expensive. The CAB's pricing structure kept fares artificially high, which kept planes fuller of wealthy passengers and largely excluded everyone else. The experience was exceptional partly because the economics demanded it — airlines couldn't compete on price, so they competed on everything else.

The Airline Deregulation Act of 1978

Jimmy Carter signed the Airline Deregulation Act in October 1978, effectively dismantling the CAB and unleashing price competition across the industry. The architects of deregulation — economists like Alfred Kahn, who led the effort — argued that free-market competition would drive prices down and make air travel accessible to ordinary Americans.

They were right. Fares dropped dramatically throughout the late 1970s and 1980s. New low-cost carriers like Southwest and People Express entered the market, forcing legacy airlines to compete on price for the first time. The democratization of air travel was real and rapid. By the mid-1980s, families who had never flown before were booking vacations to Florida. Grandparents were visiting grandchildren across the country. The airplane became, for the first time, genuinely middle-class transportation.

That's the part of the story that deserves full credit. Deregulation worked exactly as its proponents promised on the metric that mattered most: affordability.

What Got Traded Away

But here's what the economists didn't fully account for: when price becomes the primary competitive dimension, everything else becomes a cost to be minimized.

The in-flight meal didn't disappear because airlines stopped caring about passengers. It disappeared because, in a deregulated market, the airline that charged $189 for a cross-country flight couldn't afford the same catering as the one that charged $350. Passengers, when forced to choose, overwhelmingly chose the cheaper ticket. The market spoke clearly, and the industry listened.

Seats got narrower. Legroom contracted. Checked bags became free, then weren't. Then basic seat selection became a fee. Then carry-on bags became a fee on some carriers. The "unbundling" of airfare — the process of stripping the ticket down to its bare minimum and charging separately for everything else — has turned the modern flying experience into a kind of obstacle course of optional charges.

The average domestic airline seat today is about 17 inches wide with 30–31 inches of pitch (the distance between rows). In the regulated era, seat width was typically 18–20 inches with 34–36 inches of pitch. That might sound like a minor difference until you spend five hours in one.

The Consolidation Nobody Voted For

Deregulation was also supposed to produce robust competition. In the short term, it did. But over the following four decades, the industry consolidated dramatically. Today, four airlines — American, Delta, United, and Southwest — control roughly 80% of domestic air travel. That's not the competitive marketplace the 1978 reformers envisioned.

In many smaller cities, meaningful competition has essentially disappeared. If you're flying out of a mid-sized regional airport, you may have one or two carrier options, which means the price advantages of deregulation are partially offset by local monopoly pricing. The benefits of competition aren't evenly distributed.

So Was It Worth It?

The honest answer is: for most people, probably yes — but with real and underappreciated costs.

The sheer number of people who can now afford to fly, who can visit family across the country, who can take their kids to see the Grand Canyon or Disney World, represents a genuine expansion of human possibility. That matters enormously. Affordable air travel isn't a trivial convenience — it reshapes lives, relationships, and opportunities.

But the experience of flying has been so thoroughly stripped of dignity that it's hard not to feel that something was lost in the trade. The traveler who flew coast-to-coast in 1968 arrived feeling like a person who had been taken care of. The traveler who flies today arrives feeling like a unit of cargo that successfully navigated a series of upsells.

Both things can be true at once: air travel became remarkably more accessible, and remarkably less humane. Progress, as it turns out, rarely comes without a middle seat.