It's weird to see real innovation happen again. For so many years innovation has been about how to fit as many meat bags as possible in a shoe box, prentending to be luxurious, at the adequate speed to save the most fuel as possible.
That's an odd way to describe the most accessible era of global travel in human history. It's not like first class tickets, which provide a comparable experience at a comparable inflated-adjusted price, aren't available to bring back the 60s.
There are more travelers who want a cheaper ticket than there are those who want, more than cheaper tickets, (a) more comfort or (b) faster travel. Evidence for this is in the demand for cheap tickets with long layovers and repeat flyers in basic economy.
Then I chuckled at the annoyance since I, myself, had decided to get the dirt-cheapest flight available. Couldn't even be bothered to pay +$15 for an emergency exit seat.
...And I would've done it all the same again for that 2 hour flight.
I just saw a Reddit thread where someone asked how many people would pay extra for a flight with no babies allowed. I had to roll my eyes at every commenter who said they would.
— Louis CK
There are two airports an equal distance from my house. One has cheap flights, and the other does not. The one with the cheap flights also happens to be the airport for Walt Disney World.
I fly out of the expensive airport whenever possible.
A Business Class ticket on an international route is incomparably luxurious compared to anything you could purchase in the 1960s. And some of the First Class products take it to the next level. That's before you take into account the safety, time-saving, and cabin-pressure differences.
Aside: personally I'm waiting for someone to take up the Avrocar, aka the original flying saucer UFO. It's basically the jet version of the helicopter or quadricopter drone from an aero engineering tradeoff standpoint. At one point the Army thought that they'd stop buying jeeps and start buying flying saucers instead, but the Avrocar project fell apart for dynamical stability reasons. It was just too difficult to keep it in level flight during flying regime transitions, and they weren't able to design a control interface a human could use to compensate. But that was with 50's tech, and I'm pretty sure with modern ML techniques you could design a fly-by-wire feedback response control system that would have no trouble stabilizing Avrocar or an improved version of it, just like Stanford got a helicopter to fly upside down (a very analogous stability regime actually). It would fill the niche for medium-distance drone transport or perhaps short-range personnel transport (like choppers).
And saving fuel is in everyone's best interest.
> started as a luxury and moved to mass market
These two objectives are contradictory. There are so many more trips because the fares are cheap, so fuel consumption is much increased.
(Of course, I don't doubt that a lot of trips happen today which wouldn't have happened in the 60's, so you're probably still correct.)
https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2015/09/evolving-clim...