The list of air-travel fiascos this past year reads like a verse of 'We Didn't Start the Fire': A chunk of plane fell off mid-flight. Boeing workers went on strike. A CrowdStrike software issue grounded thousands of planes worldwide. A major airline merger was blocked. Passengers were terribly unruly. And yet, in roughly that same time period, much about the experience of air travel actually went pretty well: Cancellations in the first half of this year (even with that software outage) were way down from the chaos of 2022, even amidst record-breaking travel days, and last year was by some metrics the safest on record. The Biden administration implemented new requirements for airlines to give passengers refunds for canceled or significantly changed flights and announced a new rule to crack down on airline junk fees. Flights are more affordable than they were decades ago, adjusted for inflation. An air-travel paradox has emerged. As my colleague Charlie Warzel wrote earlier this year,...
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