Air travel sucks — now more than ever - Financial Times

The Tube

A Boeing 737 holds about 180 people. Load time at the gate averages 25 minutes. That’s one person boarding every 8 seconds — slower than a grocery checkout line. The plane is a metal tube with a single aisle. Physics says: you can’t get 180 bodies and their bags past each other any faster without redesigning the tube or the bags or the boarding ritual. Airlines tried. Back-to-front boarding, window-middle-aisle, assigned groups — none beat random boarding by more than a minute or two. The constraint isn’t the algorithm. It’s the aisle.

The Hub

In 1978, US airlines flew point-to-point — Dallas to Memphis, direct. Deregulation arrived. Fares dropped. Airlines consolidated. By the 1990s, the hub-and-spoke model dominated: funnel passengers through a few mega-airports, then redistribute. Efficiency for the airline, layovers for you. A hub handles more flights per gate per day, but each flight waits for connecting passengers. Your two-hour layover in Atlanta exists because Delta is batching 50 inbound flights to fill 50 outbound ones. The system works — for the network. For the passenger, it’s waiting.

The Squeeze

Airline profit margins run 2–5% in good years. Fuel is 25–30% of operating cost. A cent-per-gallon swing in jet fuel moves billions across the industry. When fuel spiked in 2008, airlines responded by shrinking seat pitch — the distance from your knee to the seat in front. Average economy pitch in 1985: 34 inches. Today: 30–31 inches. That’s four extra rows per plane, 20 more passengers, 20 more fares, same fuel burn. You feel cramped because the airline did the math: your comfort costs more than squeezing you pays.

The Slot

Heathrow has two runways. They handle 1,300 flights a day — one takeoff or landing every 45 seconds during peak hours. Slots are rationed. Airlines that hold slots keep them by using them; abandon a slot and you lose it. New carriers can’t enter without buying an existing airline or waiting for a slot to open. This isn’t Heathrow’s choice — it’s airspace physics plus political limits on new runways. The constraint cascades: fewer competitors, higher fares, packed flights. The London–New York route has the traffic to support hourly service, but not the slots.

The Merge

In 2000, the US had ten major airlines. Today: four control 80% of domestic capacity. Consolidation followed deregulation and a brutal decade of bankruptcies after 9/11 and the 2008 recession. Fewer airlines means less competition on most routes. The average US domestic route now has 1.4 competitors — down from 2.1 in 2007. One or two airlines dominate a hub, and ticket prices follow. The passenger’s leverage — switching carriers — disappeared when half the carriers did.

The Why

Air travel degraded because the system optimised for the wrong variable. Not passenger experience. Not even speed. The system optimised for cost recovery in a capital-intensive, low-margin, high-fixed-cost business. Fuel prices, slot constraints, and consolidation aren’t bugs — they’re the operating environment. The tube itself — narrow-body single-aisle jets — hasn’t changed in 50 years because physics and economics haven’t changed. Boarding is slow because the aisle is narrow. Seats are tight because fuel is expensive. Hubs exist because networks are cheaper than point-to-point at scale. Fares stay high at constrained airports because slots are finite.

The experience sucks because the system’s incentives point away from comfort and toward yield per seat per mile. That metric doesn’t care if you’re cramped. It cares if the plane is full and the fuel burn is low.