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Column: Flying was never fun

 
Published May 29, 2017

It's pile-on time for America's commercial airlines. The contempt people hold for them has long been severe, but following a raft of highly publicized incidents, resentment has hit a fever pitch.

It started about a month ago, with the forced removal of a passenger onboard a United Express flight. This was followed by several more airlines-behaving-badly controversies, up to and including the death of Simon, a giant rabbit who perished after a London-to-Chicago United flight. Over and over we are reminded about the hellishness that is commercial flying. Enabled by cellphone cameras and the catalyst of social media, even the most mundane boarding snafu or onboard fracas has been getting its 15 minutes.

I'm a commercial pilot, so I take some of this personally. I also think it's time for a slightly different perspective.

People often talk about a proverbial "golden age" of air travel, and if only we could return to it. That's an easy sentiment to sympathize with. I'm old enough to recall when people actually looked forward to flying. I remember a trip to Florida in 1979, and my father putting on a coat and tie for the occasion. I remember cheesecake desserts on a 60-minute flight in economy. Yes, things were once a little more comfortable, a little more special.

One of the reasons that flying has become such a melee is because so many people now have the means to partake in it. It wasn't always this way. Adjusted for inflation, the average cost of a ticket has declined about 50 percent over the past 35 years. This isn't true in every market, but on the whole fares are far cheaper than they were 30 years ago. (And yes, this is after factoring in all of those add-on "unbundling" fees that airlines love and passengers so despise.)

For my parents' generation, it cost several thousand dollars in today's money to travel to Europe. Even coast-to-coast trips were something relatively few could afford. As recently as the 1970s, an economy ticket from New York to Hawaii cost nearly $3,000, adjusted for inflation.

Not only are tickets cheaper, but we have a wider range of options. Even well into the jet age, what today would be a simple nonstop or one-stop itinerary could include multiple stopovers. Not just internationally, but domestically, too: Three stops in a DC-9 to reach St. Louis from Albany, then another two stops on the trunk route over to Seattle or San Francisco.

Sure, you had more legroom and a hot meal. It also took you 14 hours to fly coast-to-coast, or 2½ days to reach Karachi, Pakistan. Miss your flight? The next one didn't leave in 90 minutes; it left the following day — or the following week.

And if, in 2017, you're put off by a lack of legroom or having to pay for a sandwich, how would you feel about sitting for eight hours in a cabin filled with tobacco smoke? As recently as the 1990s, smoking was still permitted on airplanes.

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Up front, in first or business class, forget it. You can have your Pullman berths and caviar on the flying boats of the 1940s, trundling along noisily, 17 hours from New York to Paris. You can have your tuxedoed stewards and your piano lounges in the old 747 upper deck. I'll take the state-of-the-art sleeper seat and 25-inch screen; the electric privacy barrier and five-course dinner presentation. It's no contest; premium class has never been as swanky or as comfortable as it is today.

Then there's safety.

Globally — catastrophes like those involving Malaysia Airlines Flights 17 and 370 included — the last 10 years have been the safest in the history of commercial aviation. Here in North America the stats are even more astonishing: There has not been a major crash involving an American legacy carrier in more than 15 years.

For a number of reasons — technological, regulatory and infrastructural — aviation accidents have become a lot fewer and farther between. There are twice as many planes in the air as there were just 25 years ago, yet the rate of fatal accidents per miles flown has been steadily falling. The International Civil Aviation Organization reports that for every million flights the chance of a crash is one-sixth what it was in 1980. Hijackings and terrorist attacks, for all of the attention lavished on their mere possibility, have become even rarer.

There's no denying that airlines today could and should do a better job — at communicating, at treating their customers with dignity and respect. I'm well acquainted with the nuisances of modern-day air travel: I don't enjoy claustrophobic planes, delays, noisy airports or wasteful security practices any more than you do.

But those good old days, maybe, are more mythical than we admit. Do you really want to travel like people did in the 1960s? Are you sure? No, you don't have to love flying. But you shouldn't take it for granted, either.

Patrick Smith is an airline pilot who writes about flying at www.askthepilot.com.

© 2017 New York Times