This is an airplane.
Now, let's talk about playing Pong in the pub.
That's right.
These happy people were playing Pong at a table on a plane.
And guess what?
The pub was in coach.
Coach! First class got a buffet.
Where did we go wrong?
This is on a widebody DC10.
But in the late sixties and seventies, huge planes like this
and the 747 were at war...for which could be the most awesome.
They had spacious seating, amazing food, huge
lounges, pubs and yes, a piano bar.
A piano bar on a plane in coach.
Coach! Coach!
Did I mention that the little people in coach got a piano bar?
“Only one airline has the piano bar” Today flying,
well, you squeeze into a seat that you are stuck in the entire time.
You can barely move forward or backward.
You get hardly anything to eat or drink, and you're stuck next to
these people.
Now, look at this guy.
His worst problem is that his friends were eating his popcorn.
And guess what? He got more popcorn.
What went wrong?
This is not just a story about declining standards in airline comfort.
It's a story about the bigger history of the airline industry.
And it might make you think twice about whether glamorous flight
is a good thing.
Yes. I made the airplane a baby.
I know.
You want to spend your time looking at the most epic coach lounge in history.
And we will get there, I promise.
But I think that this metaphor and the early history of the airline
industry is necessary to understand how those coach lounges
happened.
In 1938, the Civil Aeronautics Board was formed.
It basically regulated the airline business for about 40 years.
Notice the “business” part of that sentence.
Initially, they did safety stuff, too, and they set the location
of National Airport.
But the key thing to note here is that the airline business was in its infancy.
They wanted to coddle that business.
Remember, this is after the collapse of a ton of businesses
in the Great Depression.
They worried that the airline industry was too fragile,
too delicate to stand up to really intense competition.
So the CAB, they set up, like, crib walls.
They controlled
the airlines, the fares, the routes, and they even gave some subsidies.
Let's imagine the Douglas DC 3 as the baby plane.
That was an important plane at the time.
It's small, it's kind of shaky.
It's like a toddler and it probably did need to be protected.
Then we go from the thirties and forties to the fifties and sixties.
Jet travel changed the game, especially in capacity.
Now, there were 180 passengers in the Boeing 707.
Okay.
Can we put an asterisk up here for the plane people?
Great.
I'm generalizing a lot here when it comes to specific planes,
trying to give people an overall arc of how things worked.
But there's a lot more that you can dig into here.
That's for sure. All right.
Get that out.
Anyway, suddenly our little baby
was not all grown up, but he was bigger.
The CAB was still really tightly controlling the market.
The results.
Higher prices — and those lowered passenger numbers.
I want you to look at this.
I read one paper that noted that the target load factor
in 1962 was just above 50% capacity.
Look at how low it is here.
The CAB actually wanted half empty planes.
Now we get to the late sixties and airplanes are...they're huge.
They're huge.
This Boeing 747.
These planes are very large airplanes.
They're having a growth spurt, except to the CAB
the airline industry is still just it's little baby.
They want to keep it regulated.
Airlines have to go through a very lengthy process to add new seats
or to change routes, and definitely to lower prices.
If you did want to change prices, there were huge debates about it,
like this one that's printed in a 1973 federal register.
It's lengthy and prohibitive
and bizarre to modern eyes that have been trained on Kayak searches.
The airline industry had become a teenager with a strict curfew and no cell phone
and no money to buy those Abercrombie and Fitch
cargo pants that would make everything okay.
If you could just get the cargo pants,
then you would kind of fit into the social scene.
You act out in the ways that you can.
You dye your hair green.
You focus on the things you can control: the marketing.
The first airline
lounges were opening in the 1930s to reward customer loyalty.
I mean, just look at the seats.
Airlines couldn't make up costs by adding more seats without CAB
approval, so seats were pretty wide and had a lot of space between them.
Seat pitch is this measurement that tells you the difference between the same point
on two different airplane seats.
Today's average seat pitch is 30 to 31 inches.
Here are some United numbers from their seats
in 1979, 36 inches minimum.
But the most striking example of service marketing was the lounges.
These people right here,
they're they're going to conceive a child in about 20 minutes.
When these huge, huge planes launched There was a slightly weaker U.S.
economy in mini recession in 1969, 1970.
That meant even more excess capacity or extra seats.
But if the CRB is keeping you locked in your room,
you can't lower prices to fill all those unused seats.
What do you do?
Well, you just double down on service marketing once again.
You start what becomes known as the lounge wars.
You replace the seats with more service, with epic lounges.
Continental had their pub.
Boeing mocked up a TIger lounge below deck
and oh yeah, American had a piano bar.
This is this is life now. Sully!
I mean, look at this article.
If you wanted to get rid of your lounge and charge slightly lower
prices, it made the news and involved a ton of debate.
All these comforts of flying, the things that made flying glamorous,
they were a way to stand out
when you couldn't stand out on the most important thing: the price.
“We'll show you.” “We'll show you why this continental wide DC10 is more fun.”
Okay, so what changed flying from glamorous to torturous?
Well, the CAB did a big investigation and, over time,
everyone started thinking that regulation was increasing prices by a lot.
After some tweaking at the margins, the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978
started down the road of dismantling the CAB.
Over the next five or so years, it was led by Alfred Kahn,
who believed airline travel should basically move out of the house.
This deregulation is a unique political thing, too, because it's all happening
during the Carter administration and it's basically led by liberal
Senator Ted Kennedy. And it goes through.
They deregulate the airline industry and that is why flying isn't
glamorous anymore.
Local and international low cost
carriers had already seen some success because they weren't regulated by the CAB.
They had lower prices and cut back on service.
Now, all the airlines could do that.
Now, a lot of things happened as a result of this.
One big thing is that a lot of carriers
switched to a hub and spoke model to add more destinations.
But more importantly, for our glamor of flight topic, they started adding
way more seats and lowering prices.
Check out this American Airlines
seat map from 1977 against this one from 1983.
Goodbye, Upper Deck Lounge.
Goodbye, Sky. Dining. Goodbye, seat gaps.
When economic competition mattered, service competition
went down the drain.
The glorious lounges you can still find today
are largely on international flights that aren't really competing on price.
I think this matters, because rarely do we get so stark
an example of our preference for low prices.
I think that
this is a question that has a lot of complicated tradeoffs.
Lots of negatives flow from deregulation.
(Furious coughing in close proximity.) However, prices really did come down.
Like in most sectors, the relationship between price and glamor is a direct one.
Today, load factor capacity — it looks like this.
Here's the earlier chart next to it.
You can see the difference.
There are more flights now and way more people flying.
Look at this chart. It's by a lobbying group.
But the point is clear: that prices have generally gone down.
Is that a good thing?
Well, I think it's a matter of preference.
All I know is that this story is not just one of changing tastes.
It's a story that gets at how we want the government
and private businesses to interact and what comes from it.
And the fact is that the glamor of flying or lack of glamor, the availability
of Pong on your airplane flight, it is a deeply political question.
And there is no such thing as free popcorn.
All right.
That's it for this one. Thank you for watching.
If you haven't been here before, this is a personal channel
where I post personal videos, history videos, stuff like that.
I've got a lot of links down the description to various papers
I read on this.
And there's a lot of websites out there, too.
I mean, plane stuff is something where you can always go way, way, way, way deeper.
So again, apologies to the plane obsessives out there.
I know there's a lot more,
but I just wanted to cover this topic of the glamor of flying.
I was just on a flight.
It was not pleasant.
So I'm curious what you all think in the comments about this issue of glamor
versus access, which is, I think what it really boils down to.
It's complicated. See, I'd love to know what you have to say.
Otherwise, that's it for this one.
And hopefully I'll see you in the next one. Thanks a lot for watching.
Bye.