People dressed up for it. The seats were wide. The food was real. You walked across the tarmac and up the stairs and felt like you were doing something kind of glamorous. Even if you were just going to Cleveland.
Now? Now you pay $400 to sit in a seat designed by someone who hates the human body. You board by group number like cattle. There's a fee for your bag. A fee for picking your seat. They'd charge you to breathe the cabin air if they could figure out how to meter it. The whole experience has been engineered to extract the maximum amount of money while delivering the minimum amount of dignity.
I got tired of it. So I started looking into alternatives and discovered something that genuinely shocked me: semi-private flights exist, they fly 40+ routes across the US, and some of them cost $200.
