[aageneral] Flying is cheap as chips â?" but no chips

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Flying is cheap as chips â€" but no chips

Bit of airline history which I had the devil of a job
researching. In 1951 fewer than ten percent of the
population of the United States had flown and the number
that had flown internationally was miniscule. The standard
round trip fare New York â€" London was $US711.
53 years later exactly that same price is available today
from Virgin Atlantic despite changes in the cost of living.
Difficult to adjust this to today's prices simply on the
cost of living because there are so many different and
varying factors.
One way is to take a basic commodity, a house.
In 1951 a three bed-roomed house in England at that time
cost just over five times this depending on how you look at
the dollar exchange. (The house was in Ridgeway Drive,
Bromley, Kent and I know the prices precisely.)
So take it that in 1951 the cost of flying from New York to
London and back was a fifth of the price of a house in the
outer suburbs of London. The same house, in the same suburb
would now cost $US362,000 so that the equivalent air fare to
house price would be something daft like $70,000.
A totally unfair comparison and the price could be
calculated another way to bring it down to, say, nearer
$10,000.
It does not change one fact; the face price of the ticket
has not changed in 50 odd years although everything else has
soared upwards.
Another example from Professor Peter Fitzroy speaking in
Australia on the government broadcasting service, the ABC,
about Money, Markets and the Economy. He said, although he
provided no reference to back it up, ‘How many of us
realise that in 1945 the cost of the air fare between
Melbourne and London was about twice the annual salary in
Australia? By 1998, the cost had plummeted to about three to
four weeks salary.’
Bear that in mind for what follows.
Difficult to find the exact date. But sometime in 1986
American Airlines decided it had to save money and so it cut
out a single olive from the salad that was served
passengers. It was the start of cost-cutting exercise which,
among American airlines, continues to this day.
This year the pace has warmed up with pillows, magazines and
baggage service being trimmed or charged for. Then Northwest
added pretzel sticks.
Now, in the United States, anyone flying from A to B gets
the flight and that is it. Many overseas travelers, used to
having food served free on board, are finding that flying
internally in the United States can mean a long hungry
journey.
Two possible answers.
The first is to pay seriously more money and fly in first
and business class. The price differential between economy
â€" that which Americans call coach â€" and business and
first class has expanded.
The second is to fly with an el-cheap, cut price airline.
One of the problems for the major airlines who have cut
passengers amenities back to the bone is that in the United
States it is now, relatively, more luxurious to fly on one
of the low-fare airlines like JetBlue, Southwest and Song
which offer quite reasonable luxuries.
Just remember to take your sandwiches with you.

Gareth Powell is a journalist and author who runs a web site
on travel, www.travelhopefully.com

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