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Why commercial aviation sucks

The big problem that faces commercial aviation is not greedy airlines. Airlines are profit-making businesses like any other: they exist to make money, which is why you are able to purchase a plane ticket at all, so be grateful for a free market providing this essential service that enables much of modernity.

No, the big problem is that customers bitch and moan about tiny seats that are too close together, being nickel-and-dimed for everything, flight cancellations and delays, checked bag fees... and then proceed to reveal their actual preference for the lowest available fare. And are seemingly unable to connect the dots between these things.

This is why I'm not all that broken up about Spirit going bankrupt: competition in a market overwhelmingly dominated by the price-conscious buyer primarily serves to drive down prices, not to create options or provide differentiation for segments of the market, and the last thing we need in air travel is lower prices. Here's what the drive to cut ticket prices does for:

Comfort: Ideally, coach would be like premium economy or domestic first class: seats with substantial armrests and legroom, and that recline far enough to allow one to sleep on long-haul flights. We could have that world if everyone were willing to pay 30% more to fly (roughly, based on those seats consuming approximately 50% more space each, minus reduced overhead for fewer passengers and less weight).

Instead, premium economy is 2x coach fare, and business/first 3-4x, and all the profit is made in the front of the aircraft from people like me who cannot tolerate long-haul flights in coach and are consequently forced to subsidize the low fares of everyone else instead of being able to sit comfortably in a better main cabin.

Reliability: While paying a premium to fly in business or first can address comfort issues, it doesn't do anything about reliability: all cabins share equally in delays and cancellations resulting from bare-bones logistics in an industry with meteorological and mechanical wildcards. I literally cannot pay for greater reliability at any price. I'm stuck with the same logistics that make the cheap fares in the main cabin possible.

I can't count how many times I've had travel significantly disrupted by a problem with some flight nowhere near either my departure or destination city that then cascaded through a system with no slack built-in to absorb cancellations that take an aircraft out of service.

All of this is downstream of most passengers wanting to pay the absolute lowest price to get from point A to point B. The most infuriating thing about this isn't the status quo, however stressful it makes the act of traveling given the high chance of disruption, but rather how few people seem to understand how intimately connected their behavior is to the things they supposedly hate about air travel. I understand the problem, and am willing to pay more than the bare minimum! But it takes a much larger portion of the market to adopt the same stance for anything to change. Until then, flying commercial will continue to suck.

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