My Dad flew 250,000 miles on United back in that era. Late 1960s. I have the bronze medallion they sent him for achieving that milestone. The seats were bigger. The utensils, steel. The meals, quite nice. No extra fees. No charge for checked bags.There was a time fifty or so years ago when you could book a flight by calling the airline on the phone and then paying for it, with a personal check, at the airport when you showed up for the flight. Airlines published system timetables which were given out at the check-in desk and those listed flights with equipment used and fares.
Then came the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978. Maybe twenty years later, a networked world brought the advent of e-tickets followed some years later with the near death of any paper tickets.
There were a number of start-ups in the early days of deregulation, People Express being a large example. The legacy carriers couldn't match their fares, or maybe they could. Bob Crandall's American Airlines originated the concept of yield management which did allow them to offer at least a few seats on competing flights that matched the fares offered by the start-ups, which had the outcome of killing off the rather poorly run start-up carriers, who also had nothing like the IT infrastructure to support any sort of yield management. After all, this was an era in which most flights went out with lots of empty seats, so getting some money for an otherwise unused seat was gravy.
My how things have changed and we now have the cheapest fares on a constant dollar basis that we've ever seen as well as some of the highest load factors and everyone searches for flights online and books there as well.
Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? It was, it really was.
People dressed up for air travel. You wouldn’t see denim on an airplane and you certainly wouldn’t see a gentlemen in anything more casual than a blazer and tie.
What people forget, when looking back on the 1960s, is that each one of my Dad’s tickets cost about as much as the brand new 1968 Ford Country Squire he bought.
Air travel is nothing like it used to be.