Airline Travel Alternatives
Tagged with display, entertainment, travel, wi-fi on January 22, 2025
My wife, Josie, and I are preparing to travel to the United States once again in March. We already have our tickets. As always, I dread the trip. Adding the layover times and the travel times to and from the airports to the flight times always results in anything from 24 to 36 hours of overall travel time.
Overseas travel is far more arduous than domestic travel, regardless of which country the domestic travel takes place. For transatlantic and transpacific travel, the airline industry has a captive market. There are no alternative means of transportation. Well, there might be if you consider hitching a ride on a cargo ship, but good luck with that.
Airline Travel is Horrible
It didn’t use to be. When I traveled in the eighties and nineties, regardless of whether it was domestic or international travel, the only thing that bothered me was the amount of time it took to get from one point to another. If you disregard the fact that people were allowed to smoke on aircraft for years before they couldn’t, airline travel was fairly comfortable.
Airport security used to be fairly relaxed. The security agents were scanning for metal objects, such as handguns, knives, and scissors. Once the hijackers on September 11, 2001, used box cutters to threaten the airline crews, airport security went from being relaxed to ridiculous. Whether it’s a body scanner or a pat-down routine, it’s invasive. Add that to the fact that some agents are assholes, and others are thieves.
In the name of profits, passengers are now squeezed in like sardines, freeing up space for more passengers. We used to be able to stand up from our seats, and move in front of the other passengers in our rows, to get to the aisle and go to the lavatory. Now, if a window seat passenger wants to get to the aisle, the other passengers in the row have to move to the aisle to let that passenger out.
Speaking of lavatories, they’re narrower than they used to be. It’s difficult for normal-sized people to move around in them. I can’t fathom how wider people use them. Perhaps they wear adult diapers so they don’t have to use them. Depending on the airline, there may not even be free seats. Along with our tickets, we had to pay for our seats separately from the tickets. It would make more sense to pay for better seats, which is what most airlines offer.
Amenities like a display monitor in the back of the seat ahead offering in-flight entertainment, and even free Wi-Fi on some airlines, doesn’t make up for everything wrong with the flight. I’d gladly do without most amenities just to have legroom. It feels like I’m continuously sitting straight up, and I don’t even have long legs.
Airline Alternatives
There are a few alternatives to airline transportation when traveling domestically. For any distance that can be reached on land in a day, I’ll gladly use one form of automobile or another. Although I haven’t done it often, I’ve even used buses and trains. I’ll only travel by air when no better option exists. When traveling over oceans, there are no options.
The only time I’ve traveled on the Pacific Ocean, and the Mediterranean Sea, was when I was one of a thousand passengers or so on a United States Navy ship while I was in the military. The only way to do it today is on a cruise, but not all the way across. There’s another way to travel, which is quite a bit faster, but not yet available.
I don’t know when airships will become viable alternatives, but a few are available now. Without doing more research, the only thing I know is that they cruise at about a quarter of the speed of a commercial jet. I wouldn’t mind because I would finally be able to sleep while flying.
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