this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2026
672 points (97.5% liked)
People Twitter
10458 readers
1219 users here now
People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
RULES:
- Mark NSFW content.
- No doxxing people.
- Must be a pic of the tweet or similar. No direct links to the tweet.
- No international politcs
- Be excellent to each other.
- Provide an archived link to the tweet (or similar) being shown if it's a major celebrity, figure or any politician
- https://www.sotwe.com/
- https://twitterviewer.net/Note: Archive.is is no longer recommended because they remove/alter content.
- If a tweet (or similar) makes a statement of fact, either mark it as "satire" in the body or provide the original source link backing up the statement (see rule 6)
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Prices were also regulated and fixed by the federal government. The federal government through the Civil Aeronautics Board set ALL domestic flight fares based on a fixed distance calculation.
Airlines literally couldn't compete on price, so they competed on perks.
In 1977, just prior to the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, the average round trip domestic flight was ~$135. That's about $746 today. Round trip NY to LA was $148.20, or $820 today. Just looking at google flights for the next 6 months, The cheapest I can find pretty consistently for the same route is $239, and the highest I see is around Thanksgiving and Christmas for around $540.
Call it enshittification, call it whatever. Flying is so much more accessible and cheaper than ever. And that has its benefits and drawbacks. The drawback is that people now look at price first and foremost and are generally unwilling to pay more for the perks beyond a little more legroom. The benefit is that it's ridiculously easy to just pack a backpack and go on a weekend trip across the country for dirt cheap.
The bigger drawback would be the enviromental damage but I get where you're going.
Well, yeah I'm just talking from a consumer standpoint.
Total global aviation only accounts for 2.5-3% of global CO2 emissions. Energy generation is 74-75% of global CO2 emissions. There are much bigger fish to fry on emissions.
Not disagreeing in general, but under a "fixed distance calculation" a NYC-LAX flight would have been quite expensive but today it's driven more by market efficiency and NYC-LAX is one of the most market-efficient flights so they can charge less per seat. You might get different results comparing something like LAX-Des Moines or NYC-Little Rock. Or maybe not.