Let’s face it, flying can be miserable. Especially when holiday travel plans get interrupted and flights are canceled due to inclement weather. But how did the flying experience get so bad?
Ganesh Sitaraman, professor of law at Vanderbilt University and author of the new book “Why Flying Is Miserable: And How to Fix It,” argues that it all stems from public policy choices — particularly a change to airline regulation in 1978.
We caught up with Sitaraman to chat about travel horror stories, book influences and why flying is so expensive. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What was your most miserable flying experience?
One of the worst things that can happen is just getting so delayed or canceled that you’re stuck in the city for an extra night when you didn’t anticipate that. To me, those are always the worst experiences … where I really have something important that I was trying to get home for but ended up missing that last flight and running down from one end of the airport to the other and just seeing the flight pull away as you approach the gate knowing you just missed it by a couple of seconds. To me, that’s always the worst.
How has your father’s job flying all over the world and your father-in-law’s job as an air traffic controller influenced this book and your interest in air travel and regulation, if at all?
Flying was always something that was common to me. I knew what it meant to take long flights and short flights and have frequent flyer miles and the status programs, and to think about hubs and nonstop flights and connections. I knew about that for much of my life in part because I had people in my life who fly a lot.
This project is part of the larger co-authored book “Networks, Platforms, and Utilities.” When did you realize that you had enough material to write a separate book on the history of airline regulation and deregulation?
That’s really where this book came from. I was working on the textbook “Networks, Platforms, and Utilities,” which is the study of the law governing transportation, energy, telecommunications and banking, and I was writing the chapter on airlines for this textbook. As I was doing the research, it was just really exciting to learn what happened in the past and how choices that were made, and particularly the choice to deregulate the airline industry in 1978, has shaped everything about how flying operates even today. As I was doing that work, I realized there’s just a lot here. … It was a lot of stuff I didn’t know, despite being someone who does fly a lot and is interested in policy and regulation, and I just thought this was the perfect topic for a book because so many other people out there would feel the same way.
What was the most surprising thing that you learned?
So one of the most interesting things that I found in the book was that people in the industry were opposed to deregulation, and that’s not usually how we think of it.
We usually think people in business are in favor of deregulation. But in the 1970s, Robert Crandall, who was later the legendary head of American Airlines, showed up at one of the hearings in Congress for deregulation, and he was really upset about the possibility of (it) …
People like him believe that the airline industry was a public utility. That it had critical public service elements. That it had to be governed that way for it to work effectively. And so he was opposed to deregulation because he thought it would lead to real problems in the industry and he was right. It has led to real problems over many decades, and Crandall himself was then one of the most cutthroat competitors in the 1980s for American Airlines. But once he retired, he went back to arguing that airlines are public utilities and that they should be regulated that way. I think there’s this really interesting switch where the people in the industry who knew it best really thought that regulation was the right way to think about making airlines work for the American people.
What impact do you hope your book will have?
I really hope my book helps people realize that the conventional wisdom that air travel just works how it works and there’s nothing we can do about it is wrong, and that the reasons we have the irritations of flying are because of public policy choices that we’ve made in the past and that we can make different choices and fix flying to make it less miserable, more enjoyable and have a more resilient, stable industry in the process.
