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Comment by k__ | Hacker News Reader

Showing median people what the upper class steals from them seems like a reasonable thing to do.

I think, there isn't any situation where it's so obvious.

One type of humans gets cramped like farm animals, and the other gets pampered like pets.

Per volume or per weight, first class pays more than economy. They’re subsidizing seats in economy. So by your logic, economy is stealing from first class, not the other way around.

Before first class, fewer people could afford to fly. Airlines adopted first class to lower costs for a wider range of people to afford to fly.

Either Freakonomics or Planet Money has an episode to cover exactly this.

There is some minimum volume that all seats must take up. I think the cost function is really about how much volume you're buying excess of the minimum. What would be interesting to see is how these compare when you look at the $/(volume - minimum volume). I'd expect that coach is already pretty close to the minimum.

> think the cost function is really about how much volume you're buying excess of the minimum

You’ll not be able to define minimum very well. It’s also not sensible to assume any volume flies free, since it costs to fly any volume.

The cost to fly the plane is paid for by passengers, and the cabin has a certain volume. The cost function is exactly based on the volume and weight used per passenger. There is no ill-defined minimum volume that costs zero.

No one said there is a minimum volume that costs zero. There is a distribution of passengers requiring different amounts of space. The airline basically decided on some minimum that will be big enough to seat some percentile of passengers. (Presumably, the extreme right tail will have to buy two seats.) The airline doesn't sell a quarter of a seat or a half of a seat, so it doesn't make sense to compare seats in a way that assumes that this minimum portion of volume could cost a different amount for different passengers. It can't be broken up, so passengers always pay for all of it.

I'm saying that we should treat this minimum as a fixed cost. The airline could outfit the plane with all seats at this minimum volume to maximize seats. Then, the cost of a seat is the fixed cost for the minimum plus the cost of volume excess of this minimum. We should subtract the fixed cost and compare the excess volume per the remaining price.

How is first class stealing anything? Without it, there would just be more second class seats. Not more space per seat.

Without first and business class - economy wouldn’t be affordable to people

To start with, if there was no first or business class, there would be more room for everyone else on the plane ? It’s pretty simple actually.

When airlines were first created there was no classes at all, there was also more space and comfort for everybody. Also, the ticket prices for those seats were so high that any ticket was just as unaffordable as first class would be today. The creation of economy class is the reason economy class flyers can indulge in the luxury of flight at all.

The only no-class commercial flights that operate today are the budget carriers, and they have the least comfortable offerings amongst all of the airlines.

No. First class helps subsidize the rest of the flight. Without it, the other seats would be either even smaller or more expensive.

Do you have any evidence of this or it's your opinion ?

Half the time I board a flight most of the first class is empty or non-existent, business is usually somewhat vacant and then there is literally hundreds of people paying $1500 for their ticket.

If you do the math, the vast majority of the flight is paid for by economy.

I invested in an airline for years and they talk about revenue per square meter in various cabins during earnings calls and press releases.

Economy (excluding Premium Economy) is the least profitable for the space.

Disagree. The airlines would just add more cattle-car seats.

Or worse, or there might be fewer flights since in general, first class subsidises the economy class on a price per inch of plane space basis.

We don't have to speculate about what they might do, as "the whole flight is economy class" is basically the budget airline business model (even though some of them have some flights that have a premium class). Apparently you can run an airline where the entire plane is cheap seating, and the outcome is the level of comfort and service provided by budget carriers.

Percentage-wise, budget operators don’t really skimp that much on things like seat pitch compared to mid-tier operators.

The way RyanAir operates is with dark patterns. They have very strict luggage rules. Everything is optional. Their booking has ambiguous wording, causing less-savvy flyers to purchase options they don’t need. They sell RyanAir lottery tickets (!) on flights.

It’s like playing a game that is solely fueled by cosmetic microtransactions. If you can/know to not give in to the various trappings, you get to play a good game for free. Except in this case the game is air travel and the win condition is extremely cheap airfare :)

I’m not sure I would call it a dark pattern, it’s the stated goal of the product. To remove as many expenses as possible, and turn as many things into paid options as they can. They don’t make any effort to hide this and the RyanAir CEO talks about it publicly all the time.

They’re no different from a lot of other budget airlines. The seat pitch is as low as it can go, the seats are cheap and uncomfortable regardless of pitch, and everything other than the seat is a paid extra.

I had to take a reasonably long Air Asia flight last year, and the worst part about it was they woke you up every two hours by turning all the lights on and making a very long announcement that the duty free cart was going to spend the next hour trying to sell liquor and terrible perfume to every passenger.

However on that same flight, one of the paid options was for an incredibly cheap add on that gave you priority checkin, priority boarding, priority immigration, and priority baggage. It was like $10 or something, insanely good value.

This is wrong.

Non-budget carriers provide are more reliable and they provide food service and arguably better seating and entertainment.

I fly economy on a "premium" carrier all the time, and it's a much better experience but if I crunch the numbers, I fail to see how first class has much to do with the flight going ahead or not.

Might motivate them to work harder, right?

Or to be born into the right family/country/situation in their next life?

This sentiment just promotes learned helplessness. While the world is by no means fair, flying first class is achievable for any able bodied person living in a first world country.

The majority of the rich are first generation. It’s far easier to become rich than to be born rich.

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