Article & Journal Resources

By Patrick Smith

After five-plus years of fielding air travel questions from the general public, I’ve pretty much heard it all. Certain subjects I expected to be popular — questions about the use of cell phones during flight, for instance — and I continue to be amazed at the number of fliers petrified by turbulence. But more than anything else, I have learned to never, ever underestimate how much people simply hate to fly.

Air travel today is a sterling example of a successfully evolved technology: something that was once extraordinary and available only to a privileged few is now ordinary and affordable to virtually everyone. With such progress, a certain level of hassle was inevitable: crowded planes, noisy terminals, lackluster service.

But it seems we got more than we bargained for. What, for example, can possibly justify the tedious and humiliating rigmarole of airport security? And the airlines themselves have made a bad situation needlessly worse. Contrary to public perception, airlines do not, as a form of policy, lie to their passengers. They are, however, insular, secretive and generally terrible communicators. Whatever vestige of dignity the experience of air travel retained was all but lost this past summer, when record-breaking flight delays stranded tens of millions of travelers around the country. It was, in many ways, a last straw.

Now, with all of this duly noted, let’s try something different. Allow me to stick my neck out and offer up some seldom-heard advice: try readjusting your perspective. Believe it or not, there’s a bright side to this mess. Even as you’re wedged into row 57 next to a screaming infant, with a Chick-fil-A sandwich congealing in your stomach, there’s plenty to be thankful for.

Let’s begin with the simple physics of it. In 2007, a passenger is able to step onto a jetliner in New York City and, in a matter of hours, without so much as a fuel stop, step off that airplane halfway around the world — in Bangkok, Singapore, Tokyo or Mumbai. That’s a voyage that once took months in a sailing ship. That 777 or Airbus A340 you’re sitting in is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, traveling thousands of feet above the earth at 500 miles per hour. Say what you want about bad food and a lack of legroom, that’s pretty darn impressive.

To say nothing of how cheap it is. Whenever people moan about the cost of flying, I think of that old American Airlines ticket that sits on the bookshelf in my home office. It’s a flea market find, and it dates from 1946. That year, somebody named James Connors paid $334 to fly one-way from Shannon to New York — roughly the same that you’d pay on Aer Lingus today. Using the Consumer Price Index conversion, $334 is equivalent to over $3,000 in 2007.

Adjusted for inflation, the cost of air travel has fallen sharply over the past two decades. According to the Air Transport Association, fares in 2006 averaged 12 percent lower than what they were in 2000, in spite of a 150 percent rise in jet fuel costs. No, amenities and customer service aren’t what they used to be, but what do you expect in an industry where per-mile profit margins are sometimes a penny or less? We all want more legroom and better meals — or meals at all — but you cannot have such things and that $79 fare to Florida.

Meanwhile, those delays we’ve all been dealing with are the product of ever-more flights departing to ever-more cities. But look at it this way: domestically, you can now fly between almost any two airports in America with, at worst, a single stopover. A few decades ago, that trip from Austin, Tex., to Bangor, Me., would have entailed awkward transfers through two, three, even four other cities. Internationally, transoceanic routes have fragmented, allowing people to fly direct from many smaller hubs in the United States to points in Europe, Latin America and elsewhere. Nobody enjoys holding patterns or sitting on a tarmac, but in earlier days the overall journey time would have been longer — not to mention pricier.

And last but certainly not least, flying remains remarkably safe. Globally, there are twice as many people traveling in twice as many airplanes as there were a quarter-century ago. The raw total of crashes has risen, but as a percentage of the whole, fatalities are way down. There has not been a crash involving a major United States air carrier since November, 2001 — the longest such streak in the modern history of civil aviation. Air travel today is roughly six times safer than it was 25 years ago, thanks mostly to better crew training and more reliable technologies. (Though you wouldn’t necessarily know it by watching TV or reading the papers; if we’re misinterpreting things, it’s largely because the media have taken to sensationalizing minor events and scandalizing what it doesn’t understand.)

In the end, there are no justifications for airlines behaving badly or denying basic dignities to their customers. But at the same time, we have lost an appreciation for just how remarkable flying is. The fact that for a few pennies per mile we have the ability to zip ourselves halfway across the country, or halfway around the world, in a matter of hours, in nearly absolute safety, is almost entirely taken for granted.