The Truth About Air Travel

Of YouTube’s many microgenres, one of the most popular and most enduring is the airplane meltdown. There are thousands or maybe millions of these videos online: Passengers going nuts over spilled drinks or supposedly bad service; flight cancellations turning grown adults feral; tiny inconveniences disrupting the brittle peace of the temporary societies that exist in the air above us all the time. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you’ll find a compilation, a clip show of modern misery.

The Atlantic’s early aviation writers would have a lot of questions about this. Those questions would probably start with “What is a YouTube?,” but I suspect they’d get more philosophical pretty quickly. In the early 20th century, flying was a source of intense curiosity and great wonder; if anyone was melting down, it was probably because they were simply so dazzled by it all, or maybe very scared—not because someone used their armrest. “For some years I have been afflicted with the belief that flight is possible to man,” Wilbur Wright wrote in a letter to a friend in 1900, eventually published in The Atlantic. Three years later, he and his brother, Orville, managed to get a biplane in the air for 12 seconds. Only 18 years after that, Kenneth Chafee McIntosh wrote that “aviation has superposed itself upon civilization. Its future is limitless, not predictable.”

Its present, however, was not fun. Early airplanes were used mostly for warcraft and mail carrying; occasionally, a passenger might come along for some reason or another, but they had to sit with the pilot in an open cockpit, exposed to whatever the weather was. Even once we figured out how to put more people inside planes, cabins weren’t pressurized, so they flew low and jiggled everyone around. Until 1930, there were no flight attendants, which I suppose means there was no one to scream at. Some engines were loud enough to cause permanent hearing damage.

Even so, the airplane’s world-changing potential was obvious. By 1941, people were writing poetry collections about it, and The Atlantic was reviewing them. After 1945, the era of mass air travel began, aviation having been “transformed by the war from a government-subsidized experiment into an economically sound transportation industry.” In the ’50s, airplanes overtook trains, and then ships, as America’s preferred means of long-distance transportation. This era is now widely considered to be commercial aviation’s golden age, when the technology was established enough to be comfortable, safe, and fast, but still novel enough to feel remarkable: human ingenuity made material. In the popular imagination, at least, this was the last time flying was dignified. Stewardesses wore fabulous outfits and meals were served on real plates and nobody knew what a vape was.

But that moment existed more in theory than it did in reality. In the century’s middle decades, flying was significantly more expensive and more dangerous than it is today. Airports were segregated until the early 1960s. Every new advance seemed to come with a downside. As soon as planes got faster and flights got longer, passengers started reporting strange symptoms, ones they would later learn to call jet lag. As more people flew, the experience became both more banal and more crowded—just another form of mass transit. More flights and faster speeds meant mounting safety concerns (some warranted, some not). In 1978, the airline industry was deregulated, which resulted in less stability, lower quality of service, and, eventually, higher fares.

By June 2001, three months before air travel was to change forever, it was already pretty bad, per the pilot and longtime Atlantic writer James Fallows. The industry was “nearing the limits of its capacity,” he wrote, having routed more and more flights through hub airports in an effort to keep planes full and maximize profits. Delays were reaching record levels. After 9/11, security theater turned flight attendants into cops and passengers into would-be criminals. The airlines continued to cut costs, squooshing seats closer together and charging for just about everything they could: legroom, internet, checked bags, overhead space, food, even water, as Ester Bloom reported in 2015. “To travel by air,” Lenika Cruz wrote in 2022, “is to endure a million tiny indignities.”

Flying really has gotten worse, due to greed and war and corporate decision making. But the truth is, the experience has always been somewhat unpleasant, because transporting human bodies through the air at hundreds of miles an hour is so difficult, it almost shouldn’t be possible. I looked in our archives expecting to find stories about air travel’s supposed midcentury glamor. I didn’t find much. But I did find a piece from 2007, in which Virginia Postrel examines the collective longing for such a time, a time “before price competition, security checks, and slobs in sweatpants ruined everything.” She quoted Aimée Bratt, who, as a flight attendant with Pan Am in the mid-’60s, “was struck by ‘how crowded it was on an airplane, no place to put anything, lines for the lavatories, no place to sit or stand … Passengers got their food trays, there was no choice of meals, drinks were served from a hand tray, six at a time, pillows and blankets were overhead, and there were no extra amenities like headsets or hot towels.’”

But people didn’t complain. “Travel itself,” Postrel wrote, “was privilege enough. Airline glamour was not about the actual experience of flying but about the idea of air travel—and the ideals and identity it represented.” Flying was budding internationalism, uncomplicated awe, wide skies, endless potential, the future made present and the impossible made real. Flying wasn’t thrilling because the stewardesses dressed amazing—it was thrilling because up until very recently, the very concept of a waitress in the sky had been science fiction.

Air travel has changed, but so have we. This is the noble life cycle of any technology: It is unimaginable, and then it is imaginable, and then it is just there. Fire, windmills, eyeglasses, the steam engine, pasteurization, cars, air-conditioning, microwaves, miniskirts, email, smartphones, bubble tea—every miracle eventually becomes mundane. It has to, I think: We need to make room for new miracles. We need to find new things to write poems about.

When this magazine was first printed, in 1857, our species thought we were stuck on Earth. We eventually figured out how to liberate ourselves from the laws of physics and fly through the air, and then we figured out how to get live television and cold orange juice and fully reclining beds up there. And then we figured out how to make all of this dreadfully tedious. That’s a remarkable human achievement, too.