Earlier quoted context omitted.
Flying was for the rich until the 1970s. The name "Airbus" describes it perfectly.
And yet the article says the reason is basically "capitalism bad": > you had airline deregulation by a guy who was an acolyte of Ronald Reagan. > The more horrible you make it to fly coach, the more business people will demand to fly business and first class. The airlines make a bucket of money off people traveling up front, which is why they make coach as oppressive as possible. Yeah no, deregulation made it so the…
> Back when the industry was regulated by the Civil Aeronautics Board, or C.A.B., airlines were not allowed to lower prices to win customers. So they had to find other ways to compete.
> They would compete against each other by adding more flights on the route. Since you couldn’t cut the price, what you would do is say, “We have the most flights.” And that really mattered to business travelers who wanted to be able to, if their meeting ended early, to go to the airport and quickly catch a flight home. So they were competing on frequency, and in other ways in service quality, by offering piano lounges on 747s. And they were gradually driving down the share of seats that were filled by adding more and more flights. And they would eventually get back to the point that they weren’t earning a great rate of return on their investment. So they’d go back to the C.A.B. and they’d say, “We need higher fares.” And the C.A.B. would say, “Yeah, okay, we’ll give you higher fares.” Eventually, in the mid-1970s, people at the C.A.B. figured out that this was just an endless loop, where we were raising fares, and the planes were getting more and more empty, and this was very inefficient. That’s where we had gotten to — pretty empty planes with very high prices.