Why are the airlines always in a crisis? Flight cancellations, delays, lost baggage, smaller seats, higher prices, fuller flights, more connections, fewer destinations. For passengers, air travel gets more and more miserable by the year. Meanwhile, bankruptcies and mergers have meant competition is at an ebb. There are now only four too-big-to-fail airlines. Although the big four made record profits before the pandemic, they then received billions of dollars in taxpayer rescue and still couldn’t offer reliable service when travel picked back up. In Why Flying is Miserable, policy entrepreneur and law professor Ganesh Sitaraman explains that the 1978 experiment in airline deregulation is the ultimate cause of our discontents. Deregulation unleashed economic dynamics that resulted in consolidation, higher prices, loss of service to smaller communities, fortress hubs and fewer direct flights, and a more miserable experience overall. Even its fiercest advocates later admitted that deregulation didn’t work out as they expected. Sitaraman argues that we can fix flying, not by going back to the old regulated system, but by learning from the American tradition of regulated capitalism and crafting new solutions that make air travel more reliable, resilient, and rewarding.
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