Yeah. You were in a tube.
But it covered up the odors people are releasing from their nether regions!
In the U.S. it was a thing right up until 9/11.
Two words folks: Midwest Airlines! Two across seating. Free wine, beer, champagn… Warm chocolate chip cookies. Freaking lobster! God damn those were the days!
I swear the TSA is the devil. I flew recently and they held everyone up while 22 (I counted) handicap people were ushered in the front of the line. Instead of doing a zipper thing they brought all those people up to the front. When I got to my gate they were closing the doors!
Damn, I miss that airline. I was on one of their very last flights. The cabin crew was a bit teary, as was I.
And I remember airport security starting in the early 70’s, after all those hijackings to Cuba and elsewhere. It just became much more restrictive after 9/11.
Oh, yes, I well remember going to the Wichita airport as part of a school field trip and climbing the stairs to the observation deck. Pretty cool stuff for an 8-year-old farm boy.
Y’all are forgetting the first Gulf War. During the war were the first restrictions of non-ticketed people going past security. They were relaxed sometime around 1994 but came back with a vengeance after 9/11.
This. In the early 1970s, in response to a wave of hijackings, U.S. airports began to conduct security screenings for people entering the gate areas (passengers as well as those visiting the gates, to pick someone up or see them off), and in 1973, the FAA mandated those screenings (metal detectors and baggage screening) at all U.S. airports.
Fat lot of good it ended up doing them, unfortunately. But hell, I used to fly for an airline that eventually went under and they didn’t even serve cookies.
As for the OP, I’m a bit too young. But I remember flying as a child in the mid 70s, visiting cockpits and such. As recently as the mid 90s I remember non-ticketed passengers meeting people at the gate.
A few weeks before 9/11 I visited the cockpit of a British Airways 747 in flight. I think by then that wasn’t allowed on American carriers, but the Brits were still OK with it. I’m probably one of the last people who got to do that.
Later I became an airline pilot myself for a while, and we still allowed people to visit the cockpit on the ground. As recently as six months ago I saw a captain on a United flight handing out wings to kids in the cabin before engine start. I mentioned to him that I thought it was great, and hadn’t seen anyone else do it in a long time.
So I’d have to say 9/11 is the biggest factor leading us to where we are now. I’ve said in other threads that we are getting exactly what we deserve in commercial aviation for making the passenger experience so miserable. We treat them like cattle who are suspected of a crime, stick to absurd rules that cannot be challenged because to examine them publicly would itself be a security risk, and then we have airline personnel required to be rather officious in enforcing their rules.
This is not to excuse poor behavior. I think people have been incentivized by other factors to act selfishly and boorishly. But we’re certainly not doing anything to make it better.
You are just cherry picking a specific route, though. I can’t a nice graph going back to 1971, but in 1995 the average domestic airfare in the US, adjusted to 2023 dollars, was $592. In the first quarter of 2023 is was $382.
Source:
But maybe Canada is different, with fewer airlines and therefore less competition.
I flew a lot as a kid. I flew as a babe in arms, and as an unaccompanied minor. I don’t have clear memories of flying before metal detectors, but the security screenings back then were quick and not very invasive. I remember putting my pocket knife into the bin people used for film (remember film?) and keys and stuff that they didn’t want on their person in the metal detector, nor in the x-ray of the baggage check. The security person glanced at it and handed it back to me.
I remember that anyone could go through security, and it was common to meet people as they exited the plane. (And as an unaccompanied minor, someone always met me at the gate.) I remember that no one checked ID, and if you had possession of a paper ticket, you could board the plane. And I certainly walked across the tarmac to the plane, and climbed up a rolling staircase board. And I remember the smoke. That was the worst part about flying. So much stale smoke, even in the “no smoking” section.
Other folks here were older, and probably have more reliable memories, but everything I’ve read rings true.
And, let’s face it, the passengers are getting exactly what they are willing to pay for. A pretty consistent driver for the airline business has been that nothing beats having the lowest fare, regardless of the hidden costs like baggage charges, comfort charges, meal charges, etc.
And the airlines are more than happy to hide those costs. From what I can tell, the business model for airlines like Spirit and Frontier is to rely on people not realizing that the hidden fees they will pay obviate their purchasing a cheap ticket. Plus, the way tickets are presented on apps and web sites makes it all too easy to sort by nothing buy price, irrespective of fees.
Hard for me to believe the airlines aren’t all in favor of all of this, and to me it’s further evidence of treating people poorly.
My personal peeve is that airlines have the goddam gall to market credit cards via cabin announcements. That’s a whole new meaning of “captive audience”, and it’s the sort of thing that consumer protection regulators should do something about if they weren’t de-fanged by Republicans who never met a fleeced customer they didn’t approve of. As mentioned up-thread, airlines apparently make big money from this practice, which means they aren’t really in the business of flying people to destinations.
This is one of several reasons why I, as a former airline pilot, try never to set food on a commercial plane anymore. I used to love flying as a passenger. Not so much nowadays, and I’m not going to blame the general public for screwing it up.
I flew a few times in that era. Just echoing, Smoking (to a non-smoker, it was torture), better dressed folks, Young attractive stewardesses in heels (I was a 200 lb. sack of 20 year old male hormones back then), access to the gate, open cockpit doors.
Sometime in the last few years (within 3 I’m sure), I was in an aircraft that still had ash receptacles in the johns. No smoking signs everywhere but the cabin interior had not been updated; maybe pulled from the boneyard in recent times?
That is required by the FAA, even on new planes. The reason is that if someone does light up a cigarette in violation of the rules, there needs to be a place to safely extinguish it without setting the plane on fire.
I think my first flight was in '69. We were visiting my brother who was stationed in (then) Yugoslavia, and flew JAT (Jugoslav Aero Transport) from some European city to Belgrade. Marshal Tito apparently wasn’t big on airport security. I remember changing planes in the middle of the night by descending a stairway and waiting on the tarmac for the turboprop flying the next leg. Oh, and my mother, who was deathly afraid of flying, sitting stiffly in her seat during the trip, jaw clenched and eyes closed.
It’s not “cherry picking”, which implies using a non-representative sample in order to deceive. I’m just using the well-remembered cost of a perfectly ordinary short-haul route circa 1971. Your comparison with 1995 isn’t particularly relevant since that is well into the era of deregulation. I grant you that it does seem to show generally decreasing airfares when adjusted for inflation. I say “seem” because airlines have been tacking on more and more ancillary fees over the years, for everything from checked baggage to meals.
I think that’s true to a certain extent. There are multiple airlines on major domestic routes, but not the kind of fierce competition as in the US. And not the same degree of deregulation, although the days of “standard” airfares are long gone. Back in the day, fares were so standardized and stable that they were actually published in the airline’s flight schedule, a little booklet that you could pick up for free. Today when I look up that same Air Canada route, there are a dozen different prices just in economy on that one airline.
(Limited aside:: Canada has lots of cozy duopolies, distances are huge and most competitors either get gobbled up, serve very limited routes or don’t last long. Airport fees are reputedly high and regulation considerable. That said, my experiences with both Air Canada and Westjet have generally been excellent. But the pricing seems almost random, despite the fact I know it is both strategic more than stochastic.)
(Bigger aside won’t be repeated: Apropos of nothing, a comedian claimed humans have thousands of taste buds each with a hundred receptors, but chickens only have thirty. So to chickens, even chicken does not taste like chicken…. (ducks and runs))
