The rarefied air at the front

By N.B. | WASHINGTON, DC

"THE rich even get better air than the rest of us," proclaimsMother Jones's Kevin Drum, riffing off an American Prospect story on "the airlines' war on the 99%". Mr Drum is referring specifically to Lufthansa's decision to install humidifiers in its first-class cabins, ensuring that the people at the front of the plane enjoy air with 25% humidity, as opposed to 5-10% in coach. But Harold Meyerson, the author of the Prospect story, has a much longer litany of complaints:

A comparison of today’s airliners with the great fin-de-siècle passenger ships would reveal a similar disparity in their treatment of passengers—lavish accommodations for first class, and the bulk of the passengers in steerage. As a socio-economic tract, Titanic could be remade today set on an airliner.

Lest you think I exaggerate, consider the changes that are sweeping the airline industry. A first-class ticket on Emirates Air from Los Angeles to Dubai entitles you to a private compartment—complete with a sliding door, a lie-flat seat and mattress, a vanity, a minibar, a flat-screen TV and luxury bathroom with shower—for a tidy $32,840. Korean Air has installed what the New York Times describes as a “spacious lounge” with fully equipped bar in the first-class sections of its planes. Delta will provide flat-beds for their first-class and business passengers on all their New York to L.A. flights starting this summer. Virgin Atlantic provides private limousine service to and from airports for their first-class passengers. Not to be outdone, Lufthansa has built an entire separate terminal for its first-classers at the Frankfurt airport, from which they are carried by limousine across the tarmac to their planes. Delta and United whisk their first-class passengers to connecting flights in Porsches and Mercedes, respectively.

[...]

Planes, like economies, are finite things. If more of the wealth goes to the top, less flows to the bottom. On airplanes, what travelers have experienced is the upward, or more precisely, forward redistribution of space—of leg room. When first class expands, coach contracts—not the number of coach seats, just the amount of space allotted to them.

Mr Meyerson is too clever to blame this phenomenon on the airlines themselves, which, he acknowledges, are "in no way responsible for the polarisation of income and wealth that defines our time". Instead he argues that the seating plans on today's planes "reflect that polarisation, with more and more space and amenities showered on...first-class passengers (whose fares rise accordingly), while less and less space and fewer—increasingly, no—amenities are provided to coach passengers."

I am not sure the situation is as dire as Mr Meyerson makes it out to be. Flying coach may be less comfortable than it was a decade or two ago, but it is far safer and significantly cheaper. Hundreds of millions of people now have access to the freedom to fly—a privilege once afforded only to the richest. (UPDATE: Several readers have asked for the data on airline ticket prices. You can find American data here and international data here. Although you can certainly cherry-pick certain years, it seems clear that the overall trend over the past few decades is down.)

Mr Meyerson is right to want to arrest the decline in quality of coach-class travel. (His tongue-in-cheek suggestion that "a new round of Occupy protestors might rise one day in coach and demand that the first-class hors d’oeuvres, or flat beds, or showers be made available to all," however, would end badly in today's security-conscious air-travel environment.) But his diagnosis of the cause of that decline elides a key factor: consumer choice.

Airlines are responding to market pressures—specifically, the unwillingness of air travellers to spend a little extra to fly in a bit more comfort. Most airlines would like nothing more than to charge for slightly better service and larger seats—that is what the continued segmentation of aeroplanes into Economy, Economy Plus and Economy Plus Plus is all about. But there is already an airline that offers better service and more comfortable seats. It's called Virgin America, and it lost $671 million between 2007 and 2012. Meanwhile, Spirit Airlines—the airline that draws the most customer ire in America, and is also very cheap—was doing just fine.

Until it makes business sense for airlines to treat economy-class passengers better, they won't. Mr Meyerson argues that passengers' collective decision to prioritise bargains over comfort is a reflection of the decline of the first-world middle class—i.e., Spirit succeeds because it is "an airline that the downsized working class can afford." That may well be part of the reason. But perhaps the appeal of a bargain is the same it has always been: it looks like a really good deal, and by the time you realise what a bad product you've bought, it is too late to change your mind.