We just need to look for and use alternatives within the whole journey.

Both flights left on time and arrived early. The cabin crew was friendly and accommodating. Okay, there was no first class and no food served, but the seats were comfortable, the seat pitch a couple of inches better than what is found in the coach section on most legacy carriers, and soft drinks and snacks were served at no charge.

Also, Southwest’s Rapid-Rewards frequent flyer plan usually has seats available on the days I want to fly. That has not always been the case on the legacy carriers.

When I can’t fly Southwest, my choices are Jet-Blue and Air-Tran. I won’t give another dollar to a legacy carrier until they start treating me as a valued customers.

We taking a trip to Denver with my patents next year, and I think we’ll take the train for a different experience. Again, way more relaxing and lots of leg and stretch room.

Hourly flights, friendly, attractive flight attendants and flight crew with a sense of fun, simple fare structures, a dedicated gate @ LAX and SFO for the Freeway Flyer, $20 on the late flights each way, $40-50 during the day. Every once in a while you could fly to Burbank and San Diego and Lake Tahoe.

That worked too well, they made money and then got too big for their britches and started losing money flying to places like Medford and Yakima and Seattle and Spokane, and got eaten by USAir, ending common sense in the airline industry for ever.

Their method, which involves a variable pricing structure, “rules,” restrictions, Saturday-night stayovers, and virtuoso nickle-and-diming, is guaranteed to engender hatred from all but the most phlegmatic or stoic. I actually have a candidate solution, at least for heavily-travelled routes, and it is this:

1: Get rid of schedules. Just have a gate for LAX, a gate for SFO, a gate for MIA, and a gate for any other city where you can fill up an airplane in an hour.

2: Share that gate among airlines. (Let them fight each other for it – leave me out of it!)

3: No advance reservations or purchase, no different fares, and charge for luggage by weight, since that’s a true expense the airlnes must bear. Pay at the gate and board immediately.

If this seems similar to a bus, so mote it be. The plane flies full and profitably, everybody pays the same and flies when they want to. Never rush for the plane or worry about security taking too long – there’s no “your flight” to miss.

Will this work? I honestly don’t know. I’m hardly an expert in airline operations (or much of anything else) and it clearly won’t work in cases where there’s a low volume of traffic since it would tie up a plane, passengers, and gate for many hours. But if it will work, or even if it might, I’d love to see it tried. Surely the airlines have enough smart people, even if they keep them hidden, to realize that the current situation is unstable and untenable.

But I don’t think we’ve reached that point yet.

On a slightly more positive note, we flew American Airlines on our way to Buenos Aires, and despite everyone’s complaints and their recent issues, we were pleased with our flight.

Of course the software that an airline would use to book and rebook tickets must be pretty old-fashioned to justify the ridiculous $100 fee, much less the laughable increase to $150.

And there are still Americans who supported Ronald Reagan who do not realize what a mess he left us with his deregulation. We will get no help from the government.

Chris, you have probably access to the actual number of flights people take. Are there numbers for the *number of people* flying, i.e. eliminating the double counts for people that fly more than once a year? Could you report those?

As far as I can see, the airline industry is so much in the hands of bean counters that they are not seeing reality anymore. When they see reduced ticket sales, they can only think in further price reductions and cost cuts, because that is the only way they can think. They can not evaluate their own product anymore. Neither do they have the balls to simply state that service comes with a price tag. At the same time, they try to hide as much of the pricing increases in fees and surcharges.

People have stopped flying, as much as they can. They only fly for business, when their boss tells them to, and to family and vacations that are not within driving range (transcontinental, Caribbean, Europe, Asia).

People don’t want to deal with crappy service, delayed or canceled flights, extra fees and surcharges through the roof, nor do they want to deal with the preposterous “security” measures inflicted onto them by the government, and readily accepted by the airline industry.

I think it would have helped if the airlines had protested a bit against all that folly? Even if they’d only done so for show, it would have generated some good will.

The time savings for flight is destroyed by the security measures and almost constant delays. I add 6 hours to the flight time to calculate how long it will take me to fly to my destination (1 hour to the airport + 2 hours early for security and checkin, + 1 hour for delays + 1 hour for luggage retrieval + 1 hour to travel from the airport to our final destination).

While I can fly to Boston in 1 hour for about $100, I can drive there in 5 hours instead of spending 7 hours to fly.