US airlines are pushing to remove protections for passengers and add more fees

It’s been a disaster. There are fewer routes, and flying is miserable, and getting worse every year. Crashes are way up this year.

Airlines profits are basically zero per ticket. Adding $10 per trip would be some sort of fantasy land windfall for the shareholders.

Deregulation badly broke this industry.

Safety is massively improved since the days of regulation. Fares are way down in real terms. Flying might be miserable, but that's because people realize they'd rather pay less than pay more for luxuries they don't actually value very much.

Your comments remind me of the arguments Ma Bell gave to justify their monopoly. Oh noez, quality will suffer if there's telecom competition. Well, people ended up being willing to make the tradeoff.

You did score a hit with airline profits being low. The whole purpose of regulation was to artificially inflate prices to ensure profits for airlines.

>they'd rather pay less than pay more for luxuries they don't actually value very much

Basically. I have used a combination of miles and co-pays to upgrade to business trans-Pacific. But most of the time going from the east coast US to Europe (especially when I can do it without a red-eye to London), I end up thinking of all the nice stuff I could do with $5K at the cost of sort of a miserable flight.

It's not that I couldn't splurge but there are other things I'd generally prefer to splurge on.

This is pretty much false. If you compare inflation adjusted cost you now get a far better service for the same price, and you get access at a price that literally wasn't possible before.

> and flying is miserable

It isn't. I have flowing with budget airlines in Europe and its, basically fine. Not luxury but really its incredibly value.

On the same price as you did before, you now get luxury.

> Crashes are way up this year.

What the fuck does 'this year' have to do with it when we are talking about something that happened in around the 1980s.

Total safety is up massively, and per passenger safety is up by an absurd amount.

Any counter-argument to this is literally not credible.

> Airlines profits are basically zero per ticket.

So capitalism works? Not sure what your point is.

> Deregulation badly broke this industry.

Based on what?

One reason flights are more miserable is planes are more heavily loaded. Before deregulation, planes were usually ~50% full. Today in the US, it's about 84%.

This is directly correlated with airfares. Were planes as sparsely loaded now as they were then then fares would be correspondingly higher. But in a deregulated environment there's a very strong incentive for increased economic efficiency to keep the fares competitive.

I'm not sure if either you or the person you're replying to are correct about safety. The way I see it, safety is completely orthogonal to regulations about routes, passenger services and so on. Safety's been on a rough upward trend throughout history as technology improves. No matter what tools are given or taken away from airlines for extracting value from their passengers, I don't see how it impacts safety, since actual flying is its own separate thing. The one exception is rules on e.g. crew composition, maximum working hours for pilots, and so on. But in these cases, deregulation would hurt both.

This year has been bad in the US, mostly due to ATC issues.

I’m talking about airlines in the US, which is where the deregulation happened. You cite European airlines, which are heavily regulated.

Nonsense, deregulation happen in Europe as well with many of the same effects.

And in both the US and in Europe airlines are 'heavily' regulated. That's a meaningless distinction.

Ironically, South West was the most successful budget airline in the US, and it was way better then Raynair the most successful budget airline in Europe.