This week’s “chart of the week” is a reminder of just how good we’ve got it. For some reason, the discourse stinks of a peculiar stench of elitist nostalgia. It’s not your grandad’s nostalgia of “in my day we went to the movies for 5 cents”, but an elitism reminding us of the grand old days of aviation, when ordinary people dressed up to travel and the airline served you a lobster thermidor on the one and bit hour flight from Sydney and Melbourne.
Other than that never happening, what the nostalgia ignores is that aviation was expensive and unaffordable to most people. It was simply too expensive to fly the way we do now, for ordinary people! As we’ll see, air travel is cheaper and thus more accessible than ever …