Social media is replete with memes showing photos from the glory days of airline travel, where well-dressed travelers—think scenes from the TV show "Mad Men"—reclined in comfy seats, drank wine, and ate cooked meals. It's a huge disconnect from our modern airline experiences, which are punctuated by surly crowds, automated systems, and long TSA lines.
The point of the social-media photos: Look at how good things were then and how awful they are now. Like all nostalgia, they contain a ring of truth but are mostly nonsense. Airline travel prior to 1978, when President Jimmy Carter spearheaded the Airline Deregulation Act, was a high-end affair. I was a teenager in the early '70s when my parents took us to Florida. It was nice, but the flight was an enormous expense for my public school teacher Dad.
