Special Report: The United States’ air transport system is going in reverse

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The swanky interior of one of United Airlines’ newest Boeing 787-9s is a lodestar for the future of U.S. aviation — and a throwback to a bygone era.

Two-thirds of the 206-foot-long airplane is earmarked for premium seating. You won’t see an economy class seat until after the aircraft’s third set of exit doors behind the wing. It’s a layout reminiscent of the start of the jet age almost seven decades ago, when carriers catered to those who could afford pricey fares to cover the high cost of flying. Back then, a round-trip economy class ticket from New York to London cost the equivalent of today’s business class.

The United States’ air transport system is going in reverse, flying back up the cost curve of the spending that makes an airline run. The forces unleashed by deregulation are fading fast, and it’s not just the soaring cost of fuel triggered by the U.S. and Israel’s war with Iran that is to blame. Prior to the conflict, air travel was already being remade by everything from the price of accessing the gleaming new airport terminals that are springing up across America to systemic inflation.

Airlines are sandwiched between those rising expenditures from below and operational constraints from above. The consolidated hub-and-spoke structure has made the system more brittle as carriers face the constraints of limited runways, taxiways and airspace. The bigger airplanes needed to alleviate congestion are not arriving in sufficient numbers, while that upgauging simultaneously makes accessing small cities across the country’s vast geography ever more challenging and expensive.

“With more than 18,000,000 flights managed and over one billion passenger movements traveling across our skies annually, our current system has reached its limits,” Federal Aviation Administration chief Bryan Bedford wrote in prepared remarks to the U.S. Senate’s aviation subcommittee on May 19.

These trends explain American aviation today and lay the groundwork for what lies ahead. The failure of twice-bankrupt Spirit Airlines on May 2 and the secretly-floated, publicly-rejected mega-merger between United Airlines and American Airlines are connected by a common thread. U.S. carriers are running out of ways to grow organically in the world’s original air transport market and are now hitting a ceiling in the country’s fragile aviation system, developments that keenly and quietly concern industry leaders.