WTF went wrong with air travel?

16 Aug 2022

Throughout my international travels this summer, one thing that I was constantly reminded of is just how terrible air travel has gotten.

Articles like these highlight the problem complete with shocking statistics for flight delays, cancellations, and overall reliability and traveller’s confidence. Less measurable, but no less troubling, is the qualitative experience we’ve all come to associate with air travel—frustration, discomfort, incompetence. Things seem to have fallen off a cliff post-pandemic. On more than a few occasions during my travels, I had the thought that if civilised society were to one day crumble, the result would look something like the inside of a major American airport.

I don’t know exactly what I think of all this and whether I’d do anything about it (probably not, let's be honest), but here’s a mix bag of raw thoughts I noted down during a recent flight delay:

Air travel is one of the rare technologies that has gotten substantially worse over the years. You’d never want go back to an older version of the iPhone or a TV, but in many ways our grandparents’ experience with flying in the 70s and 80s was far more comfortable and luxurious than what we have today. What does that tell us about the natural arc of technology?

The state of air travel today support Peter Thiel’s thesis that technology, in the world of atoms (i.e. not the internet or software), has been stagnating since the 1970s. He points out how, as a society, we still gives up the same time to commuting (driving and flying) as we did in the 1960s. Why has this time not been freed up, or this energy applied elsewhere?

The Concorde, which flew ~twice as fast as commercial jets today, was active between 1969 (coincidentally around the time Thiel marks as the start of technological stagnation) and 2003. What does the fact that it was phased out tell us? Perhaps what travellers want is not getting somewhere faster, but cheaper. Demand for air travel is highly elastic.

What are the points of friction today?

• Waiting, waiting, and more waiting—To board, on the tarmac, after landing. Travel has become a test of patience. Accounting for airport time, sometimes it can be faster to drive than to take a short-haul flight.
• Having to go through security & passport controls (CLEAR is making some progress here in the US)
• Airports themselves—poorly designed, chaotic, an environment that somehow leads to the abandonment of any sense of decorum.
• Inadequately trained or unhelpful staff
• On the plane: Bad food, uncomfortable seats

Suspending incrementalism momentarily, what would a brand new airline look like if it was reimagined from scratch today? Some rough ideas (N.B. these don’t necessarily work well altogether):

• Costco Kirkland of airlines. Guaranteed around delays, cancellations, generous and clear compensation policy.
• Conversely, is there room for an upscale, aspirational brand? What would it look like if Equinox started an airline (they did a hotel)?
• A plane where passengers are encouraged to stand up and walk around while in the air.
• Business class only flights on highly-trafficked routes. Also, no babies or checked bags.

Questions I’d ask if I wanted to tackle the problem of making air travel great (in order):

1. What would the ideal experience for air travel look like (assume no constraints, other than physics)?
2. Can this be done?
3. Would that make for a good business?

Why aren’t there more aviation-related startups? Not just airlines, but across the value chain.

• There are a few, like Boom (building supersonic planes) and Duffel (infra to plug into airline reservation systems).
• It’s a very capital-intensive problem to tackle, which requires a founder who is already wealthy or has the ability to marshal low cost of capital. Brian Chesky tried to launch an airline. but had to kill it when their core business came under pressure.
• At the same time, those people mostly already fly private, thus they’re blind to the problem / opportunity.
• Poor economics (vs. other businesses founders could work on): the total market cap of all US airlines combined is just ~5% of Google’s (Back in 2012 when Thiel pointed this out, their combined market caps was ~1/3rd of Google’s, so the gap is only getting wider).
• It’d require a unicorn founder—someone stupid enough to launch a new airline yet genius enough to successfully pull it off. Maybe this person doesn't exist!
• Richard Branson (Virgin Atlantic): “If you want to be a millionaire, start with a billion dollars and launch a new airline.”
• Taiwan’s newest airline, STARLUX, provides an interesting case study. It was founded by a pilot with a passion for aviation and bootstrapped with his family fortunes.

How do regulation and airline cartels play into innovation in the space? What was it like back in the “golden age of aviation”?

So many critical sectors, like aviation, rely on legacy systems (e.g. NOTAM, Sabre). What’s the best way to upgrade industry-wide, shared infra & systems? To varying extents, banking, utilities, and healthcare also face this issue. Perhaps it’s worth drawing lessons from the telecom model—how cellular networks get upgraded every decade (4G to 5G). Core R&D driven by private company (Qualcomm), with industry buy-in.

Most of the explanations point to labour shortages—i.e. pilots, airline staff, ground crew laid off during the pandemic who were not hired back in time to meet the demand rebound. So where did all these people go? Why has it been so hard to hire them back, or recruit new people into the industry?

What else would you add?