Turning Aviation Upside Down - The Legacy of September 11th

My sons, Antonio, Sam and Joseph in 2001

Through the window of the room my three sons shared in 2001, they could lie in bed and watch airplanes on approach to New York City's many airports. A few days after September 11, my youngest son, Joseph, then seven, asked me to close the blind. He was worried that the planes would fly through the window. 

It saddened me that airplanes would become a source of fear to my children but as far as aviation is concerned this is the legacy of September 11.

A list of all the ways that air travel has changed since that day ten years ago is lengthy but the rise in the price of oil and the ramping up of air security were the most potent motivators of change. 

Airlines that could not meet the challenges failed while others merged to survive. Routes, schedules and on-board offerings were cut. Today air travelers complain

• Planes are crowded
• Amenities are eliminated 
• Security is time-consuming and arbitrary

I can argue both sides of all these changes. Certainly they are responsible for the ubiquitous "hassle factor"  of flying in the 21st century, yet one can't dispute the results. Airlines are profitable again, more people fly to more places around the globe and all the while the price of air travel has remained more or less the same for decades. That's right, I said decades. 

According to Victoria Day, a spokeswoman for the Air Transport Association, "In 1978, an average 3,000 mile round-trip domestic ticket cost about $255. In 2009, adjusting for inflation, that same ticket should have cost about $838," she wrote to me in an email. Instead, "that ticket cost about $362, a 57 percent DECLINE in real terms."

Well the decline in the airport and airplane experience is obvious. Just the same Victoria has a valid point. 

Security? Well, bitch and moan all you want - you'll do it anyway - but we've not had a successful  attack on an airline in America since 9-11.  That's not just luck because from Richard Reid's shoes to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's shorts to the 2006 plot to blow up multiple airliners, Lord knows, there have been attempts.

But just as certainly, the fun is gone from air travel and for most people only the fear and frustration remain.   

In this month's column for Trains magazine, Don Phillips the retired aviation correspondent for the Washington Post opines that public fascination with "big things that move" is to be expected, because trains and planes are  "the soul of drama." 

He's right. When I was a child, my dad used to drive my siblings and me to Miami International Airport where we would sit on lawn chairs at the edge of the runway and watch the planes take off and land. This was entertaining for hours and free for the taking.  Who could imagine  the "drama" of aviation would turn so ominous? 

When the terrorists boarded those airliners in Boston and Washington, DC they hijacked more than those four planes. They hijacked aviation itself and took it to a place from which there is no return.