I remember flying as a little kid, before you could book a trip online. I vividly remember waiting anxiously for the actual paper tickets to come in the mail after Dad had bought them on the phone. I also remember going to the airport and wanting to be able to hold onto my own boarding pass.
From what I recall, the ticket itself wouldn’t get you on the plane; you still needed an actual boarding pass. Why did they bother with the actual ticket, rather than just mailing you a boarding pass?
The same reason why now you have an e-Ticket and use that to get a boarding pass. A boarding pass is typically issued within 24 hours of the flight. Flights often change between buying a ticket and actually leaving - the time might change slightly, they may cancel one route and put you on another, etc. Or if your luck is bad, the flight is canceled due to bad weather or some other event.
Airlines also overbook; a boarding pass is the magic thing that actually gets you into the plane.
So in essence, a ticket - whether a hard copy ticket or an eTicket - is something that says yes indeed, you paid for a flight, and gosh darn it, we’ll do our best to get you on one. A boarding pass is a much tighter agreement, issued only when it really does look like the flight will take off and they will give you a seat on it.
Pulls out paper ticket…
there’s a lot of information printed on the ticket which isn’t on a boarding card. It’s bascically the legal contract between you and the airline. Back before the intertubes took over, that information was necessary if there was a problem with a flight. If, for example, you wanted to change a flight, it could be done through a travel agent. Using the information on the ticket, the agent can determine what, if any, additional fare had to be charged and then the ticket could be revalidated with a tiny posit note type deelie noting all the changes. The airline can then be informed by whatever means were available (probably a teletype machine).
A paper ticket also had a certain element of actual cash value to it. Back in the day, if a flight was delayed, I could take my paper ticket to the counter of a competing airline, and they would honor it if possible. Eating the original issuer’s lunch, so to speak.
You can’t do that with e-tickets, though. I suspect that was at least a part of the motivation toward the paperless process…TRM (who remembers when “E-Ticket” only had meaning at Disneyland)