Flying Used to Be a Big Deal. Here's What We Traded Away to Make It Cheap.

Think about the last time you booked a flight. Maybe you were lying in bed, half-watching something on Netflix, when you pulled up an app and locked in a $79 fare to visit your cousin in Phoenix. The whole thing took four minutes. You didn't speak to a single human being.

Now try to imagine doing that in 1978.

You couldn't. Not even close.

When Flying Was Something You Planned for Weeks

Before the internet, before deregulation fully reshaped the airline industry, booking a flight was a project. You called a travel agent — an actual person whose job was to navigate the labyrinthine world of airline schedules and fare codes — and you did it well in advance. Walk-up fares existed, but they were punishing. Planning ahead wasn't just smart; it was the only realistic option for most travelers.

The Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 changed the competitive landscape, but even through the early 1980s, flying remained expensive relative to average incomes. A round-trip coach ticket from New York to Los Angeles in 1980 could run $550 or more — which, adjusted for inflation, lands somewhere north of $2,000 today. Flying wasn't something you did casually. It was something you saved for.

And because it cost so much, people treated it accordingly.

You Actually Got Dressed for the Flight

This part tends to get the biggest reaction from younger readers: people used to dress up to fly. Not business-class passengers — everyone. Slacks, blazers, dresses. You wouldn't show up to an airport in 1975 wearing athletic shorts and a hoodie any more than you'd show up to a wedding that way. The airport itself had a certain formality to it, a sense that you were participating in something that still carried a little wonder.

And the experience inside the plane backed that up. Coach class — what we'd now call economy — came with meals. Real ones. Hot food, served on trays, with actual silverware on many carriers. Drinks were included. Flight attendants, then called stewardesses at most airlines, were trained to deliver something closer to hospitality than crowd management. Legroom was genuinely more generous. The whole environment was calibrated around the idea that flying was, at minimum, a comfortable experience worth the considerable sum you'd paid for it.

First class, meanwhile, was something else entirely. On some long-haul routes, carriers like Pan Am offered multi-course dining experiences, cocktail lounges mid-flight, and seats that bore little resemblance to what we'd recognize today. It was, by almost any measure, a more civilized way to cross the country.

Then Came the Race to the Bottom — Sort Of

Deregulation opened the skies to competition, and competition did what it always does: it drove prices down and stripped out everything that wasn't strictly necessary to get a body from point A to point B. Budget carriers emerged. Legacy airlines scrambled to match fares. The meal carts got lighter, then disappeared from domestic flights almost entirely. Seats got closer together. Bags started costing extra. The whole experience was systematically optimized for efficiency and price.

By the 2000s, a coast-to-coast fare could be had for a few hundred dollars. By the 2010s, ultra-low-cost carriers were offering base fares that would have seemed like a misprint to a traveler from 1980. Today, Americans take roughly 900 million flights per year. In 1970, that number was closer to 170 million. The democratization of air travel is real, and it's significant.

More people fly now than ever before. People who never would have been able to afford a ticket in the regulated era now visit family across the country, take vacations to places they'd otherwise never see, and conduct business that once required a phone call or a letter. That's not nothing. That's actually a lot.

But Here's What Got Left Behind

What's harder to quantify is what the experience cost us in other ways. Flying today is, for most people, somewhere between mildly unpleasant and actively stressful. The airports are crowded. The security lines are long. The seats are narrow. You're paying extra for a carry-on, paying extra for a seat with two inches of additional legroom, paying extra to board before the chaos. The meal — if there is one — is a $14 sandwich in a plastic wrapper that you eat with a plastic fork while your neighbor's elbow occupies a portion of your personal space.

Nobody dresses up. Nobody really expects anything. The bar has been lowered so many times that most passengers have simply stopped looking for it.

There's also something worth noting about the travel agent. That relationship — the person who knew your preferences, who could navigate the system for you, who provided actual expertise — is largely gone. We replaced it with comparison sites and algorithms, which are faster and often cheaper, but which also put the entire burden of research, planning, and problem-solving on the traveler. When something goes wrong, you're on hold for two hours, not calling someone who knows your name.

So Was It Worth It?

Honestly? For most Americans, probably yes. Affordable air travel has genuinely expanded what's possible for millions of people. The ability to book a flight at midnight on your phone for less than a tank of gas is a kind of freedom that didn't exist 50 years ago.

But it's worth pausing to acknowledge what the lens of time reveals here: we didn't just make flying cheaper. We made it smaller. Less special. Something to endure rather than enjoy.

The skies are more accessible than ever. They're just a little less magical.