I’m curious if those who did not fly until later in life (say, over 16) were scared to fly or eager?
As a kid I cried when I got on the plane but when it took off I immediately stopped and thought it was really neat. But that’s me and I was like…six years old (I forget…give or take a year). Way different than being an adult and flying the the first time.
My GF is in her 50s and, while she has flown many times, is scared of it every time. She copes but not happy about it.
Statistically speaking, fares fell on average after deregulation in 1978. Fares did increase for some smaller airports, but for New York CIty, i’d imagine that flights are cheaper now (accounting for inflation of course).
I was one of the ones who flew pretty young, but I wasn’t eager. I was really prone to ear infections as a child, and until my teens, I tended to get nasty ear/headaches when the cabin reached altitude. I don’t think I was a shrieking horror, but I was never happy about it.
Just a data point.
I was eager for the actual flying part. I was more nervous about the stuff like “How does the check in process work?” “What am I supposed to do at the security checkpoint?” “Will I be able to navigate O’Hare Airport?”
I remember being amazed by how far I had traveled in such a short time. When I was a kid we would drive from North Carolina to Wisconsin to visit my grandparents. We’d get up early, drive all day, and stop for the night somewhere in Indiana, then drive through Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin the next day. So when I got off the plane at O’Hare I couldn’t quite wrap my head around the fact that I was somewhere that in my mind took more than a day of travel to get to, but I got there in just 2 hours.
Never.
My parents took my oldest brother on a trip when he was a toddler. My father took my other 2 brothers on trips to visit his mother in Florida; I was never taken on one of those (though he DID take me and one brother on an overnight train trip when I was 9). Other than those, we basically only went on vacations every 2 years, and always to the same place (oceanfront city about 4-5 hours away). First time I ever flew was when I was 17, and visiting colleges - Dad took me to several, then had a work event he had to attend so he sent me home via airplane.
I remember being worried I’d need to get my luggage at the airport where I changed planes, and was very gratified to learn that I could check it all the way through to our home airport.
My kids have been much better traveled than I was at any point. We took Dweezil on his first plane trip when he was about 18 months old - to visit family. These days, that same trip, we’d just drive - with airport delays etc. driving would be faster. Another trip to Boston when they were 4 and 1. Then we took them to California when they were 8 and 5 respectively, and to Arizona when they were 11 and 8, and to the southwest again when they were 16 and 13.
So: 3 or 4 trips apiece, very sporadic.
Ooooh yeah.
Well, there was the time I had to fly to Florida on very short notice (like, 12 hours), to drive my in-laws north. Then again, this was when a hurricane was approaching, and for some reason, there were NOT that many people flying TOWARD it. We actually had an empty middle seat.
And when we flew to Arizona in 2005, the plane was not crowded - to be fair, that was December 25th. The return flight, on January 1, was jammed.
In the early 1990s, I was basically commuting to California every week. I changed planes either in Dallas or Chicago. A surprising number of those flights were fairly empty, and I was able to stretch out across several seats.
Nope, I was eager to go anywhere, but my dad NEVER went anywhere for vacation, I mean NEVER. His vacations consisted of home improvement/repairs or laying around in his underwear reading sci fi.
The only ‘vacations’ we took were to see some relatives and that ended around 4th grade for me as neither me nor my brother were in the ‘cute kid’ stage any longer so no demands from relatives to see the babies/kids