Flying is historically cheap: How we got here
- The first commercial airlines in the U.S. date back to 1914.
- Flying remained expensive and unreliable for decades.
- In 1978 the government decided to get out of regulating airline prices and the industry saw a tremendous shift.
Flying is great, despite all the complaints people have. I know what you’re thinking: “flying is miserable, it used to be better,” but that’s just not the right mindset.
Here’s the thing – and I’ve written about this before – it didn’t actually used to be better. People found stuff to complain about in the “Golden Age,” and they’re just finding different stuff to complain about now.
Sure, flying used to be more luxurious, but that made it largely unaffordable.
“It was very expensive, it was luxurious by today’s standards. It wasn’t like you were on a flying bus with no legroom. It was meals on every flight (and) lots of legroom,” Andrew Parton, president of the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Garden City, New York, told me. “It was almost like somebody’s living room, but it was extremely expensive.”
To understand how we got to the state of play in the industry so many people love to hate today, it’s helpful to understand get a handle on how it all began. This week we’re looking at how commercial airlines got started in the U.S., how they evolved, and where they’re headed.
Welcome aboard.
How airlines started
Commercial fixed-wing airlines in the U.S. date back to 1914 when the St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line began regularly scheduled service across Tampa Bay. The flights cut the travel time between the two cities from a two-hour trip by boat to just 23 minutes. But flying for decades remained an expensive and unreliable proposition.
“A lot of airlines came and went because the aircraft themselves were so inefficient. There was no way they were ever going to make money, no safety regulation. It wasn’t a practical thing yet,” Bob van der Linden, curator of air transportation at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum told me.
He said the first two decades or so were just about proving the viability of air transportation. First the postal service inaugurated their own air routes for express shipping. In 1926 the postal service started contracting out those routes to commercial airlines, pushing for competition and more efficient planes in the process.
It wasn’t until after World War II that flying became more commonplace, van der Linden said, but its passenger lists were still limited.
“It was all regulated. Prices were all regulated by the federal government,” he said. “While aviation was much more common and many more people were flying, it was still mostly restricted to upper-middle class and the wealthy.”
This, of course, is a huge oversimplification of the history behind the airlines, but knowing the industry’s beginnings is important to understanding how it evolved.
Cruising Altitude:The window seat passenger controls the window shade. End of story.
How aviation got here
Up until 1978, interstate and international airline routes and prices were controlled by the federal government via the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB).
Flights remained expensive even as technology made planes faster and more efficient.
“It was becoming increasingly obvious that the regulatory agency, the CAB, was falling behind in the regulation. It would take years to approve new routes and fare structures,” van der Linden said.
In 1978 the government decided to get out of regulating airline prices and the industry saw a tremendous shift.
“Hundreds of airlines got started or filed after deregulation and went out of business,” van der Linden said. “If you were flying between major cities, you could now get really, really inexpensive flights. If you were flying between not-so-large cities, they would charge what the market would bear, and all of a sudden, prices went up a lot on shorter routes. You just had chaos for many years.”Parton added that flights on some routes to smaller cities, like New York to Buffalo, could – and still can – be more costly than flights from the U.S. to Europe.
“The pressures of competition forced airlines to take a look at how they operated, even the routes they take,” he said.
Overall, flying today is a much better deal in terms of dollars and cents than at almost any other time in history.
“Today you could, if you do some good shopping, you could fly transcontinental, say New York to San Franciso, for $300,” van der Linden said, noting that in actual dollar terms, it’s the same price as in 1930. “The price hasn’t changed, but the value of the dollar has, dramatically. In 1930, $300 could buy you an automobile.”
Of course, the democratization of air travel has also meant a change in the way airplanes are outfitted and how inflight service is handled.
“All of the amenities were wrapped up in the price of your ticket, including leg room,” van der Linden said. “People complain – these are the same people who complained about the bad airline food before deregulation, now they’re complaining about not getting any food … If you want more legroom, if you want a meal, you pay more, go sit up in business class.”
What’s next for air travel?
If you think about how airlines got started in the U.S., it turns out the evolution worked. The original goal when the post office started air mail routes, and then contracted them out to commercial enterprises, was to prove that air transportation was economically viable, and in the long run, to make it accessible to as many people as possible while also encouraging the development and refinement of new technologies.
That, van der Linden and Parton agree, is indicative of where things are heading next, and the next changes are likely to be more marginal and focused on efficiency and environmental friendliness.
“Engines burn cleaner than ever. By this point it’ll be an evolution,” van der Linden said. “Basically, airplanes now have range that is about as far as you really need to go, they can go 8, 9, 10,000 miles. From a purely common-sense standpoint, you don’t need an airliner to fly more than 12,000 miles because that’s halfway around the world. If you need to go more than that, go the other way.”
One thing is unlikely to change however, as passengers continue to be motivated largely by finding the cheapest ticket.
“We’re not going back to the glory days of flying, it’s still going to be a bit of a bus with wings,” Parton told me.
Zach Wichter is a travel reporter for USA TODAY based in New York. You can reach him at [email protected].
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