Airlines are just a terrible business. Massive fixed costs, massive variable costs, tons of regulation, tons of competition, and the outlook for the industry only gets more grim. COVID is just a 1 in a hundred year event, terrorist attacks happened before and after 9/11.

It’s a miracle that airlines are as functional as they are. People REALLY like flying.

The TSA is definitely the worst innovation of the last 20 years. Additional to that, lost luggage, missed or delayed flights, expensive changes - and I will still happily get on a plane without a second thought whereas I may have abandoned some other industry over far less. The ability to fly is truly miraculous. For $500 or less I can travel most of the way across two continents at non-peak times, and for about a grand I can cover most of the globe. Even poor people can scrape together that kind of money every once in a while.

I'm not sure people LIKE flying, it's just the best of a lot of mediocre alternatives depending on the distance you're traveling and the time you're willing to allocate.

I've certainly had a few airline experience that ended in my wishing I had just driven from A to B because delays and the general inconvenience of it all meant that it would have been faster AND cheaper to drive, but of course we didn't know that when we booked the flight.