Show up, pay, and ride? Like getting on the subway? Not workable, for two reasons: 1, from the passengers' perspective, you need to get to Indianapolis, and when you show up, there are no seats, or worse, no flights. 2, from the airlines' perspective, no one buys advance tickets, you have no idea how big of a plane (and thus also how much fuel and how many support staff) you'll need, nor when, nor even whether you'll need a plane at all. Planning. Airplanes aren't subways.

Yes, we have, as long as your definition of "we" includes "society" or "people who aren't Sovereign Citizens." I don't know anyone who thinks an airline boarding pass is "unacceptable."

I know a lot of people who kind of put up with it because "I guess that's how it has to be." That sort of compromise is pretty fragile in the longer term.

We were lobsters in a pot. Watching the relationship that we used to have with air travel and airports in movies from the 90s and before must be surrealistic to young people.

You must be in a pretty restrictive bubble if you believe the "compromise" needed to accept the boarding pass system creates a fragile situation.

If you were talking about the security theater around travel, as well as garbage like secret no-fly lists, I'd agree with you.

But requiring a boarding pass to get on a plane is no more ridiculous to a near-total majority of humans than requiring a ticket to watch a movie at a theater.

Does Ridley Scott get a list of the names of people who watch his films?

I'm not sure how you equate watching a movie (which many would consider a relatively safe activity) to riding a plane with hundreds of other people (which some might consider not necessarily risky, but riskier).

But sure, I guess I'll say "no, he doesn't". Now what?

You can still do that (boarding pass has nothing to do with that process), but given that most people book in advance, you'll run the risk of there not being room on the flight you want, or of getting a crappy seat, or of having to pay significantly more than if you booked in advance.

You always received some form of printed boarding pass... It's not exactly a new concept in air travel.

The difference is how intricately tied it is to personal identity. It's the difference between cash and a card.

Yes, I can't possibly imagine why it might be important to verify the identity of people getting on an airplane.

It's amazing the number of people who can't think just a little bit ahead and realize one of the major reasons for boarding passes and seat assignments is the possibility of a plane crash. Because there's two possibilities...

One, where the FAA investigators have a list of people's names and what seats they were assigned, the seats have numbers engraved on them, and if lap belts were in effect generally still contain at least a torso. Meaning getting everyone's various bits and pieces back to their loved ones is a gruesome jigsaw puzzle, but a solvable one.

The other possibility is that the FAA investigators get a list of names of people who were /probably/ on the plane, a large field strewn with "loose meat and offal", and absolutely no good starting point. Also, a gigantic lawsuit and a moon-sized chunk of bad press as loved ones get the wrong body parts, or too many body parts, or too few body parts.

(BTW, never explain this to anyone who is currently on a plane.)

Airplane accidents existed before 9/11 and it was never a motivation to identify who is flying, so that's not it.

Remember that before 9/11 a flight ticket was just a physical ticket like any other. You'd buy it and could sell it forward or give it away to whoever and they could use it by just showing it. Nobody cared who it was, just that everyone boarding had a ticket.

How is that different from a car crash? Just the number of passengers?

Also you generally know who is in a car.

If its my car, and i'm missing. Its my body. If its my car, and i'm at home, its my partner driving my car, or i knew who borrowed it.

Cars are tagged with a plate, and VIN and other details that make it easy to identify. Less people means easier to find wallets/phones/identifiers in a clean up action.

Also the extent to which the pieces of the puzzle may get scattered, I guess. A car crash rarely leads to body parts strewn across entire fields.

I get the sarcasm, but...why does it have to be that way? For decades, high-school kids kept their rifles in the trunk, and fewer students got shot than now.

At our high school most of the pickup trucks had gun racks. It wasn't until like, my sophomore year of high school before anyone even considered "Hey... those shouldn't be on school grounds". We all knew quite well "no guns allowed in the school", but rifles were about as common as umbrellas and considered equally notable. One day a nice officer noticed there were like five trucks with rifles visible in the back window, and went to the office to ask the students be advised _they might be stolen_. Halfway through that conversation it dawned on them that they were in fact guns, and then an announcement was made on the PA reminding students that they were actully still guns and were very banned in school so people should take them home after school and not bring them back.

ONE student forgot the next day (who was a "bad" kid but not actually a bad guy) and was allowed to apologize to the school for his forgetfulness over the PA to make amends. (I shared a class with him when he got called to the office, so I know he was embarrassed to have forgotten. It was bad for his carefully cultivated "bad boy" reputation to get caught out doing something this trivial.)

The difference between then and now is that since people were always interacting in person there was less tendency for people to become psychopath basement trolls who would willfully bully someone to the breaking point and beyond.

In the UK, you can fly domestically without showing any ID (unless you check in luggage, where there's a cursory visual check against the ticket name).

No ID is checked at airport security. On airlines that aren't trying to use name change fees as a revenue stream, there's no ID check at the boarding gate either.