Russ Roberts is a retired international airline captain and the author of “Unlearning to Fly: Navigating the Turbulence and Bliss of Growing Up in the Sky.”
Massive TSA lines at U.S. airports are making headlines since the government partially shut down a month ago. But to the weary traveler, the resulting delays might just feel like more of the same, all part of the typical airport experience circa 2026.
Also included: an overpacked terminal, a crowd at the gate and an anxious wait for an aircraft that hasn’t yet arrived. By the time you finally board and buckle in, you’re worn down — and air travel feels like one long, agonizing slog.
Pull up a photo of a Pan Am Boeing 707 cabin from the late 1950s, and the contrast couldn’t be sharper. The early jet age looks calmer and roomier. People are dressed up for the trip, relaxed and smiling.
What happened? Has U.S. air travel really gotten so much worse since the jet age began?
It depends on what you mean by “worse.” If you’re referring to coach comfort, the answer is often yes. If you mean price and access, it’s often no. As for reliability, the answer is mixed and varies sharply depending on carrier, season and airport.
To understand why traveling economy class seems to have gotten worse, start with the airline’s inventory problem. In most businesses, unsold goods can be discounted. If a shirt doesn’t move this week, it can go on sale next week. If a car sits on the lot, the dealer can cut the price. Even perishable goods often get a second chance through markdowns, bundles or a bargain bin.
An airline seat doesn’t work that way. It’s a one-time offer tied to a specific flight at a specific hour. Once the jet leaves the gate, an empty seat is “real estate” forever unsold. You can’t mark it down tomorrow because tomorrow is a whole new inventory. Today’s inventory disappears.
That harsh fact is why airlines chase full flights. The cost of running a flight hardly shrinks when a few seats are empty. The U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics has a blunt phrase for this reality: breakeven load factor — the share of seats an airline must fill, at current average fares, for passenger revenue to cover operating expenses. The bureau also notes something sobering: Since 2000, some carriers have at times been unable to cover operating expenses even when selling 100 percent of their seats at the average fare.
The airline business model runs on thin margins. Put thin margins together with inventory that vanishes the moment the jet moves away from the gate and you get a business that depends on efficiency and volume. Airlines keep base fares low because customers shop hard on price. Many travelers truly want the lowest price on the screen. In that sense, many passengers are getting what they paid for: A rock-bottom fare buys transportation. It doesn’t buy calm, space, flexibility or a pleasant airport day.
It also creates a split screen in the sky. Premium passengers often enjoy lie-flat seats on long-haul routes, access to airline lounges, better food and beverages, and a faster path through the airport via services such as Global Entry, TSA PreCheck, Clear and dedicated lanes. Meanwhile, a typica economy passenger gets the bargain version of the same trip on the same jet, with fewer cushions against delays and discomfort.
Now consider comfort, and a word people often misuse: pitch. Pitch is not “legroom.” It’s the distance from a point on one seat to the same point on the seat in front of it. So “31 inches of pitch” is seat-plus-space, not 31 inches of free legroom.
A lot of U.S. domestic coach seating clusters around roughly 30 to 32 inches of pitch, and that front-to-back squeeze is what bothers many passengers most — especially when flights run full and there’s little room to spread out.
Seat width, meanwhile, is where memory often misleads us. The story is not “coach seats were wide in 1958 and then steadily got narrower.” The clearer story is that once airlines created mass-market cabins in the late 1950s — often labeled “tourist class” — a familiar coach-style layout arrived.
A Travel+Leisure history of airline seats notes that the original one-class, five-abreast Pan Am 707 had seats about 19 inches wide. But very soon, denser six-across “tourist” seating produced triple seats about 17.2 inches wide and became the standard high-density layout in 707s and later the narrow-body families in service today.
The point is not that every airline used the same width on every airplane. The point is that the mass-market coach geometry appeared early. Over time, row spacing and how tightly the system is run have changed further.
Human bodies changed as well, which matters when the geometry is tight. National Center for Health Statistics data show large increases in average adult weight from the early 1960s to 2002. A seat that was tolerable for a typical body in 1962 can be a tight squeeze today, even if the width hasn’t altered much.
Finally, reliability. The Department of Transportation defines “on time” as arriving within 15 minutes of the scheduled time and publishes monthly carrier results. In November 2024, the DOT reported Hawaiian as the most on-time carrier at 89.2 percent of flights on time, with Delta close behind at 88.6 percent and Southwest at 86.9 percent. Frontier was among the lowest that month at 76.7 percent. Carrier choice, then, often shapes passengers’ perception of quality as well.
So, has flying gotten worse since the 707? Coach comfort, especially row spacing, often has. The airport experience — crowds, queues and security — also significantly influences the public verdict. Price and access, however, have improved dramatically.
The jet age of the 1950s didn’t end. It scaled. And when you scale a thin-margin business built on disappearing inventory, you get exactly what we have now: fast travel at mass-market prices, with comfort sold as a premium feature. Air travel is not so much worse as it is relentlessly optimized.
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