Flying is great, despite all the complaints people have. I know what you’re thinking: “flying is miserable, it used to be better,” but that’s just not the right mindset. Here’s the thing – and I’ve – it didn’t actually used to be better.
People found stuff to complain about in the “Golden Age,” and they’re just finding different stuff to complain about now. Sure, flying used to be more luxurious, but that made it largely unaffordable. “It was very expensive, it was luxurious by today’s standards.
It wasn’t like you were on a flying bus with no legroom. It was meals on every flight (and) lots of legroom,” Andrew Parton, president of the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Garden City, New York, told me. “It was almost like somebody’s living room, but it was extremely expensive.
” To understand how we got to the state of play in the industry so many people love to hate today, it’s helpful to understand get a handle on how it all began. This week we’re looking at how commercial airlines got started in the U.S.
, how they evolved, and where they’re headed. Welcome aboard. Commercial fixed-wing airlines in the U.
S. date back to 1914 when the St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line began regularly scheduled service across Tampa Bay.
The flights cut the travel time between the two cities from a two-hour trip by boat to just 23 minutes. But flying for decades remained an expensive and unreliable proposition. “A lot of airlines came and went because the .