Ship travel in the age of sail was more accommodating. At least you can walk around and shit.
It takes so much longer though. I don’t think I’d prefer the travel time of a ship over the sea over the temporary discomfort of a flight.
Only up on the poop deck though.
Airliner ticket prices used to be regulated. So when all airlines had to charge the same price, they had to find other ways to be competitive in order to bring in customers. Deregulation in the 70s brought ticket costs down but that means ticket cost is now the primary point of competition between airlines and amenities now come at a steep premium.
Yep, you can have it one way or the other…cheap flights or super luxury and only the rich can fly. Planes are not cheap to operate and fuel isn’t free.
Frankly for short haul flights it makes sense. Would it be worth paying double or triple for a three hour flight just to get a full meal? Anyone who truly wants a taste of old time flying can get that with a first class ticket, both in terms of cost and quality.
And CEO bonuses and shareholder dividends must always be high-flying.
But even with that margins are tight, so 99.5% of why your flight is expensive is that planes are not cheap to operate and fuel isn’t free. But we can pretend it’s all the other thing to maintain slave morality.
So tight! Can barely afford to keep the plane in the air what with all the stock buybacks.
Also when was the last time an airline stock paid a dividend?
Delta is paying a dividend of $0.15 per share in August. Southwest paid $0.18 this month. Spirit used to pay $0.10 but I don’t think they do any more.
But on the plus side normal people can use air travel now.
I’m not so sure that is a positive. Airplanes are huge emission drivers and our dependence on the convenience of air travel has caused us to cease investment and innovation in other more efficient and environmentally friendly methods of travel.
No doubt there’d be a lot more support for high speed rails if airplanes weren’t as accessible. IMO airplanes should only really be used for intercontinental travel.
When you factor in the number of people the airplane carries, they are about 3 times more efficient than a car with one person in it.
Note they mentioned rail as the desired alternative, rather than cars.
Just saying, compared to driving, airplanes are usually better. Also trains in the US suck. Much slower, and almost comparable in price to air travel.
Also trains in the US suck. Much slower, and almost comparable in price to air travel.
It doesn’t have to be that way, many other countries have solved those issues. But because we’ve leaned so heavily on air travel to get us to places only a few hours away by land there hasn’t been any incentive to innovate or invest in other forms of long-distance mass transit.
Seeing as I can see my family and not be homeless, I consider it a positive.
Are you saying a high speed train to your destination wouldn’t also solve that problem? It would likely end up being cheaper to travel via rail considering the lower costs of maintenance and fuel, meaning further accessibility than we have today with our dependence on air travel.
Yes I am, as most trains don’t cross oceans.
That’s fair, and please note that I mentioned air travel has its place in intercontinental travel in my previous comment. The whole point I’m trying to make is that domestic flights between areas that could support high speed land travel infrastructure are wasteful.
Even within continents, high speed rail is expensive, many cities and towns aren’t large enough or near large enough cities to make it practical. This would mean distant connections on slow trains and very long journeys.
Because our children’s children will still be paying the tab for that unsustainable opulence. Fuck they’ll be paying the bill for recreational air travel with only pretzels.
They used to be also fascinated by plastic.
I bet their smiles would not last long realizing that the 5g bag of pretzels has 2g of plastic (and that’s just the tip of the plastiberg).
Please just let me recline a bit more.
Meanwhile, me aboard a train: “Oh you can get whole massive meals on restaurant cars these days? No thank you, I’ll get a coffee and one of those overpriced naff sandwiches.” (Well, the Finnish train sandwiches are pretty good, but they are hella overpriced. Like 7€. WTF.)
7 Euros = 7.55 USD That is a pretty normal price for a sandwich in the USA. I wish I considered that overpriced. 5 or more years ago I probably would have said that was overpriced.
they’re overpriced in the sense that a sandwich does not in any universe cost that much to actually produce, not in the sense that they charge more than other people do for sandwiches.
7 euros isn’t too much more than what a sandwich can tend to cost at Pressbyrån in sweden, which is infamous for charging out the ass for everything just because they can. A normal grocery store that carries some premade sandwiches might charge more like 5 euro for them.
One word: “Greed”
people would rather be assfucked by a super sonic wheel than be fingered by the TSA
Singapore air? Isn’t there an airline with couches and sleeping quarters? 0/10 I hate chu
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That tray table is WAYYYYY too big and luxurious.
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That cup is about double the size they give now.
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You didn’t get to pick those pretzels, there was just the single “choice” now.
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Also, you didn’t get to pick that seat and you had to have last minute anxiety that you wouldn’t even be assigned a seat by the gate agent at the airport (after already taking time off from work to travel and committing $100+ for uber or airport parking)
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You also paid at least an extra $100 to have a carryon bag (more depending on your route) and even more for a checked bag.
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shitty rental car at your destination now costs $100/day and parking at your hotel is not free, and is in fact $30-$50 additional per night.
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And your garbage hotel room costs 3X what it should.
Even spirit airlines allows you to pick your seat provided you book in advance
Allegiant and Frontier don’t, unless you want to pay extra to pick your seat. Some will cost more than others.
It doesn’t though with the basic fares now. Boarding pass has “see gate agent” printed where a seat assignment would be. And no guarantee of a couple/family being seated together.
Also always rumors of airlines testing stacked or standing seats to cram even more people in each plane.
Oh yeah, they may have charged like $10 for me to pick my seat, but that seemed worth it for a guaranteed window seat
Depends on the market probably, but a lot of spots it’s like $50-$100 extra, each way, to upgrade to the seat level that let’s you choose a seat. Frontier and spirit used to be the joke, but most of them are doing it now. Cliche joke used to be that they’d charge you each time you used the bathroom (maybe they actually happened in Europe, Ryanair?) But like too many things, we’re close to living the onion.
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Good old airlines and their ideal business model:
Charge you like you’re flying on Concorde.
Treat you like you’re on a 16th century slaving ship.
Don’t forget that enshittification creeps into the real world as well
Look at you, flying on rich planes with that much space in front of you
Airlines were not more luxurious 50 years ago.
You had more legroom and the TSA didn’t exist, but everything else was way worse.
Also the safety was statistically worse for the most part
Yah, but you could smoke.
Yuck. That’s a con.
I swear, nobody on Lemmy gets sarcasm without being slapped in the face with it.
Everyone on lemmy is autistic.
Autism is better than every ism.
You clearly havent experienced late stage redneckism. Its fun.
Archs car battery… again.
Every organism?
Well if there wasn’t an organism, there would be no autism. I still don’t get why people bully us, while their image of autism is heavily influenced by stereotypes and old research.
Seriously tho, like reddit was autistic enough but now you gotta be even more niche enough to know about smaller better reddit.
Let’s maybe not use “autism” so derogatorily?
I blame it on the fact that autists will literally rip something apart if its making a weird noise. So a lot left reddit for being broken. Source I am autistic.
I am acoustic, thank you very much.
Well, we do what we can, but there’s only so much acetaminophen (paracetamol for our British friends) you can give to pregnant women.
I have no clue what you said, but I like your words magic man.
And I, for one, think you deserve to know the truth about how N-Acetyl-p-benzoquinone imine (NAPQI) affected us when we were yet in the womb.
Or grew up around conservatives and heard that shit being said unironically.
I still hear people fondly reminisce about leaded gas. If you think I’m missing a joke, no. They will drive to airports to buy the leaded gas they sell there.
Not so much could as did.
Smoking section: 20 rows, next to the air filters.
Non-smoking section: any seat where the ashtray in the armrest didn’t work
As far as I know, economy seats are still sold at a loss. They make up for it in the higher classes. I don’t fly through Doha often but when I do, I do like getting on Qatar Airways.
