What prices, published ticketed fares? They have been cut in half in constant dollar terms between which periods of time? They certainly haven't done that in the most recent one-year, three-year, or five-year period.s Has that taken place in the most recent ten-year period? No. In the most recent fifteen-year period?


It has nothing to do with making up stats; it has to do with letting people go fish for themselves if they so wish to challenge their own political prejudices in support of the industry.

I'm not here to spoon-feed adults on demand or to be a tutor for those incapable and/or unwilling to try to work on analysis of this too. Numerical literacy matters, and I encourage it by not babying adults.

I find it cute when people rely upon "Airlines for America", as that is an industry lobby group which would be more accurately described as "Airlines Against America" since it is so very customer-unfriedly and wants to keep peddling a story about airline affordability to try to justify their customer-unfriendly positions. They are the purveyors of that chart in your link.

Less affordable in some markets has taken place while becoming more affordable in other markets. Don't confuse the US for the rest of the world.

When the world's population has grown by a few billion in our lifetime and when relative wealth has increased in much of the non-OECD world where low cost carriers have increasingly become the norm, THEN divergence in affordability between different markets and a large growth in the absolute number of people flying shouldn't be a surprise. But that doesn't say anything about what has happened in the US to affordability of air travel for the average American household.