Originally Posted by findark

It's hard to compete with random anecdotes ($99 is awfully cheap for a transcon back in the day, and all reliable sources concur that average fares have remained roughly constant in nominal dollars since 1930), but even today you can fly LAX-NYC round-trip for $72 (in 1982 dollars) or as little as $50 if you want to fly Frontier (and not non-stop). If "way back when" is before Carter-era inflation, then this difference becomes much more dramatic.

I think the grand conceit is that the number of dollars to fly on a plane has never really gone down, and we are really, really bad at considering inflation.