Why Does Flying Suck So Much?

Written By: Ian Firstenberg

Airports are Hell. Airlines are the Devil. To purge the evil, the government should use the same strategy it employed against the railroad: seize it.

It’s unclear whether it’s the barrage of bright neon colored advertising, the prison cell sized workspaces, the perpetual delays or the indignities of TSA security checkpoints but recently, while sitting in the SeaTac Airport on a 13 hour flight delay, I felt that all those plane hijackers in the 70s were really on to something.

My girlfriend and I arrived at SeaTac two hours early for a 9am flight. As we shuffled through security, we got a notification that our flight had been canceled for “unscheduled maintenance” and that we’d been rebooked on a one stop flight 13 hours later.

Thus we embarked on an exhausting adventure from one end of the West Coast’s shittiest airport to the next until we were mercifully granted access to the iron bird that shuttled us back to SFO half a day late and $150 lighter.

While air travel was once a luxury reserved for adulterous businessmen and chipper stewardesses, it’s now just another common facet of modern life. And it’s become an exhausting, anxious chore.

Part of the story of how this one time luxury became a living hell is the ‘premiumifcation’ of the airlines themselves and part of it is the monopolization of the airline industry.

Starting with the industry…

Through the second half of the 20th century some of the biggest and most demonic companies we’ve come to know and love began to swallow up the smaller airlines eventually leading to what we have now.

According to an analysis by Skift, one airline dominated 40 of the 100 largest airport markets in the US, up from 34 airports a decade earlier. To add insult to injury, the four giant carriers American, Delta, United, and Southwest are headed for record profits in 2024 at $25.7 billion.

Monopolies, especially in the US, are nothing novel. That said, there are some wrinkles to the airline monopoly that are noteworthy.

For one, all of those four titans of the air are backed by the same institutional investors. BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street and PRIMECAP all have substantial stakes in Delta, American, United and Southwest.

Secondly, this monopoly — rather than drawing the ire of federal regulators — has earned immunity from the federal government due in large part to what’s called international alliances.

International alliances are marketing ventures used by national airlines to sell seats through smaller carriers. The immunity claim is hinged on the faulty premise that the partnership lowers fares for consumers, while the airlines collect larger profits without having to use additional aircraft.

It’s important to note that while domestic alliances are not immune from antitrust laws, the proliferation of international alliances has left consumers statewide and worldwide with higher fares, worse service and fewer flying options.

As of 2023, there are three major airline alliances: Star Alliance — which was founded in 1997 by United and Air Canada and currently houses 26 international members; SkyTeam — which was founded in 2000 by Delta, AeroMexico and Korean Air and houses 19 members; and One World which was founded in 1999 by American Airlines and British Airways and has 19 members.

The timeline of all three is critical here. While alliances have been common practice for decades, airline profitability has not. In fact, billionaire Warren Buffet had sworn off investing in the industry as a whole in part because of the “kamikaze pricing tactics of certain carriers” and referred to himself as an “aeroholic” complete with a toll-free number to talk him out of any such investments after being burned in the 1990s.

Setting aside the incredibly corny quote from America’s corniest oligarch, it begs the question, what changed? Buffett’s Berkshire Hathway poured in a cool $1.2 billion into the airline industry in 2016, according to the Harvard Business Review.

The international alliances mentioned above all came at the end of the 90s when airfares were cheap and profitability was low. They allowed companies to fix their prices and cut costs, thus supercharging the profits.

The second part of the story is the premiumificaiton.

In order to increase profits, airlines began breaking down portions of the existing product to add additional charges. You’re undoubtedly familiar with these tactics.

It’s $26 to choose your seat, $50 for an extra bag, $40 to board early and so on. Often, these additional costs are couched as necessary increases to account for labor costs or maintenance.

Those excuses fall flat when you look at the economic reality for the workers at the major airlines. Pilots may have earned a substantial 21 percent bump in 2023, but flight attendants hadn’t earned a raise since the pandemic and picketed major airports this February as a result.

So these cost increases have not been going to the people doing the heavy lifting for the airlines.

Unsurprisingly, the executives have not been tightening their belts. The United CEO, Scott Kirby, nearly doubled his salary from $9.8 million in 2022 to $18.6 million in 2023.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention John Barnett. Barnett was an engineer for three decades with Boeing before retiring in 2017 due to substantial safety issues he reported that went unheeded. Barnett was found dead in his truck on the third day of testifying as part of a whistleblower case against Boeing and its repeated safety issues.

The details of Barnett’s death are harrowing and while it was ruled a suicide, the prevailing understanding — even among some of the most reserved publications in the world — is that there was some kind of influence on the part of Boeing.

All this leaves me, and hopefully you, with one question.

What is to be done?

Federal seizure and disassembly. As the government did with the similarly corrupt railroad industry in the 20th century, take control of the airline industry and institute real safeguards against the monopolization that has left us wandering SeaTac for 13 hours. Dismember the bloated executive classes of United, American, Delta and Southwest and give the money to the flight attendants, the baggage handlers, the airport janitors and bartenders.

Beyond the moral implications — which have never been a huge concern for the federal government anyway — it’s financially sound.