As I'm sitting in Frankfurt airport, dreading my flight back to Dulles, I can't help but think and write about the woes of travel. United has already lost my luggage. Last time I landed at IAD, there was no bus waiting to take us to the terminal. We stood in the jet bridge for 37 minutes, belly to belly, because no one listens when they announce to remain seated while we wait for a bus. That's the American airport experience in miniature: you did everything right, and the system still doesn't care.

I hate airports. I hate flying. Not in a nostalgic, "remember when travel was glamorous" kind of way. I hate it because the experience is objectively worse than it was five years ago, and five years before that, and the trend line points nowhere good. More expensive. More crowded. Less humane. Less honest about what's happening to you while it happens.

Call it a complaint if you want. It is one. But it's also pattern recognition. The machine is functioning perfectly, just not for you.

The Price of Everything, the Value of Nothing

Every piece of the flying experience has been carved off, piece by piece, and sold back to you as a privilege.

The base ticket gets you a seat, barely. Want to choose where you sit? Fee. Want to sit next to the person you're traveling with? Fee. Want a bag in the overhead bin? Fee. Want a bag underneath the plane? Another fee. Want to change your flight when life happens? Fee so large it might as well be a punishment. Want food? Want WiFi? Want a blanket? Want to board early enough to actually use the bin space you paid for? Fee, fee, fee, fee.

The price of flying has risen while the product has shrunk. You pay more for less legroom, less service, less reliability, less dignity. Airlines discovered they could degrade the core experience and then sell back fragments of it as "upgrades." Comfort isn't a baseline anymore. It's a microtransaction.

Airports as Hostile Infrastructure

Airports used to function as transit spaces, places you moved through on your way somewhere else. Now they function as stress engines, environments designed to extract money and minimize cost while keeping you just comfortable enough not to revolt. The architecture funnels you past retail. The seating is sparse by design. The announcements are constant, loud, and rarely useful. You're supposed to stay alert, stay anxious, stay consuming.

You're even punished for arriving early. The gates offer abysmally uncomfortable seats, criminally limited in number, scattered around outlets that don't work. You did the responsible thing, showed up with time to spare, and your reward is standing against a wall or sitting on the floor.

The feeling is hard to name but easy to recognize: you paid for a ticket and somehow lost the right to exist comfortably until you reach your destination.

Case in point: United's terminal bus system at Dulles. You've already cleared security. You've already walked. You've already waited. And now you're herded onto a standing-room bus, shoulder to shoulder with strangers, bags clutched to chests, swaying through a tunnel system that feels like a logistical afterthought someone forgot to fix for thirty years. Running late for your connection? Doesn't matter. The bus doesn't leave until it's full. Your stress is irrelevant; the system optimizes for batch efficiency, not your flight time. This isn't a temporary workaround. This is the design. This is what they built and what they kept.

The message is clear even if no one says it aloud: your comfort is not part of the calculation.

Boarding Is Ritualized Chaos

There is no honest boarding system left in American aviation.

The groups are meaningless. Half the plane qualifies for "priority" now, which means priority means nothing. Gate agents enforce rules selectively, if at all. The line becomes a negotiation, a slow-motion conflict where everyone watches everyone else for signs of cheating. Did he just cut? Is she in the right group? Why is that family boarding now?

And underneath all of it, the real competition: overhead bin space, the Hunger Games nobody signed up for.

Airlines know exactly how many carry-ons fit in the bins. They know the math. They sell more bin-dependent tickets than bins can hold, and then they act surprised when passengers claw for space like it's Black Friday for overhead bins. The ones who lose get their bags gate-checked, sent to the belly of the plane, delayed on the other end, sometimes lost entirely. Or worse: you find a spot ten rows behind your seat and spend the flight playing musical chairs with luggage, swimming upstream against deplaning traffic to retrieve it. The conflict isn't a bug. It's an externality the airline has decided you will absorb.

And the thing is, we know how to do this better. COVID showed us. Back-to-front boarding, actually enforced, is dramatically more efficient. Less aisle congestion. Less time on the ground. Less chaos. The science exists. Airlines ignored it, because the current chaos serves their upsell model. Pay more to board earlier. Pay more to guarantee bin space. Pay more to escape the problem they manufactured.

This is the pattern: create friction, then sell relief. Degrade the baseline, then charge for what used to be included. They do it with seat selection. They do it with legroom. They do it with boarding order. They do it with bags. The dysfunction isn't an accident. It's a revenue stream.

Then there's Southwest, which replaced group chaos with numerical chaos. You line up by number, except the separators marking each group of five are about three feet apart, somehow expected to contain five adult humans with bags. The queue forms directly in front of the seats where Groups B and C are waiting, so you're standing in someone's lap while they're sitting in your way. "Are you 14? I'm 15. Who's 14?" The whole ritual devolves into a roll call nobody asked for. And once you board, everyone walks the full length of the plane, desperately avoiding the middle seat, while flight attendants shout that it's a full flight and the middles are going to fill anyway. It's cattle processing with a number system.

Treated Like Cattle, Processed Like Cargo

At some point, the metaphors stopped being metaphors.

You are packed. You are queued. You are scanned, sorted, tagged, and moved in batches. Your body is treated as a variable to compress, not a person to accommodate. Seats shrink. Legroom disappears. Armrests become contested territory. You fold yourself into a space designed for someone smaller, and you stay there for hours, knees pressed into plastic, shoulders hunched, apologizing silently for existing in three dimensions.

And if you try to recline your seat, a feature you technically paid for, you feel a wave of guilt. You're about to drop into the lap of the person behind you. If their tray table is down, forget it. You're physically blocked from using a function built into your seat. The recline button exists, but using it feels like aggression. Another feature that exists on paper but not in practice.

When something goes wrong, when your flight is delayed or your connection missed or your bag vanishes, no one owns the problem. You're handed off from agent to agent, script to script, each one empowered only to shrug and point you somewhere else. There's no escalation path. There's no single human responsible for getting you where you paid to go. You are a unit in a system, and the system doesn't adapt to you. You adapt to it, or you wait.

Cargo has tracking, declared value, and contractual liability. You have a boarding pass and a prayer. And the prayer doesn't have a service guarantee either.

TSA, PreCheck, CLEAR: Layers of Nonsense

TSA is security theater performed with the enthusiasm of a DMV and the consistency of a coin flip.

The same airport, the same terminal, different rules depending on who's working the line. Shoes on here, shoes off there. Laptops out today, laptops in tomorrow. Liquids scrutinized one week, ignored the next. You learn to watch the person ahead of you and mimic whatever they do, because the official rules are less reliable than crowd-sourced guessing.

PreCheck was supposed to be the escape hatch. Pay the fee, pass the background check, and you get predictability: keep your shoes on, keep your laptop in, move through faster. Except now PreCheck is crowded because everyone has it. Go to Atlanta and watch the PreCheck line snake through the terminal with no end in sight. "Trusted traveler" now means "slightly less untrusted." The value proposition collapsed under its own success, and TSA's answer is to keep selling memberships anyway.

Then there's CLEAR, which sells biometric identity verification as speed. What it actually delivers is another queue, another checkpoint, another system that fails when the scanner doesn't read your eyes right or the staff doesn't know the process. You're now paying for three overlapping identity systems, TSA plus PreCheck plus CLEAR, and you still wait. You still bunch. You still get barked at.

When a system needs three parallel solutions and still moves slowly, the problem isn't identity verification. The problem is that no one designed the flow.

Lounges: The Last Refuge, Collapsing

Lounges used to be the pressure release valve. The place you could sit in a real chair, eat something that wasn't wrapped in plastic, exist for an hour without being shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers. The reward for the credit card fee or the status tier or the luck of an upgrade.

Now lounges are just airports with better lighting.

They're packed. They're loud. There are lines to get in, and once you're in, there's nowhere to sit. The food has been quietly downgraded, the drinks rationed, the hours restricted, the guest policies tightened. Try the AmEx Centurion Lounge at DCA. You'll wait in line to get in, then wander the room looking for a seat that doesn't exist, or get turned away entirely because they've hit capacity. The same pattern that ruined the main terminal has crept behind the glass: sell exclusivity, oversubscribe it, degrade the offering, act surprised when people complain.

The Polaris Lounge in Newark is genuinely nice. Comfortable seats. Good food. Quiet. And it's reserved for international business class passengers, which means: is being comfortable in an airport literally only for the rich now? Is that the model? Everyone else gets the stress engine, and if you want to escape it, you need to drop four figures on a ticket?

The lounge was supposed to offset the pain of flying. Now it just concentrates the pain in a smaller room with an espresso machine.

Lost Bags, Shrugged Shoulders

If your bag is lost, you discover exactly how little the system cares about making you whole.

There's no urgency. There's no ownership. There's a form, and a reference number, and a vague promise that someone will look into it. Days pass. Then weeks. You call, and you're told to wait. You wait, and you're told to call. The bag exists in a bureaucratic limbo where no one is responsible and no one is trying very hard.

After six weeks, sometimes longer, the airline finally admits the bag is gone. And then the reimbursement process begins, which is its own special indignity. Receipts are demanded. Values are disputed. Depreciation is invented on the spot. You submit a claim for what you lost, and you receive a fraction of it, slowly, after fighting for it.

The airline lost your property. You absorb the cost, the inconvenience, and the emotional labor of chasing what you're owed. This would be unacceptable in any other industry. In aviation, it's Tuesday.

The Contrast That Makes It Unforgivable

Then you fly through Frankfurt. Or Stockholm. Or Singapore. Or Tokyo. And you realize the misery is optional.

The difference is immediate and physical. The signage is clear. The flow makes sense. Security is firm but not adversarial. You move through the airport instead of being trapped inside it. There's space to exist. There's air to breathe. The system assumes you're a traveler, not a threat or a revenue source or a problem to be managed.

When something goes wrong at Changi or Haneda, someone owns it. The response is fast, personal, and oriented toward fixing the problem rather than documenting it. Lost bags get found. Delays get explained. The assumption is that your time matters and the system should earn your trust.

Coming back to the US after that feels like a downgrade you can't unsee. The contrast isn't marginal. It's cavernous. And it makes clear that the American experience isn't inevitable. It's a choice. A policy choice, an investment choice, an incentive choice. Other countries chose differently, and their airports work.

Why This Actually Matters

Travel is supposed to expand you. It's supposed to connect you to places and people and possibilities beyond your daily life. The journey is part of the experience, or it should be.

Instead, flying has become a punishment you endure to reach the part of life that actually matters. The airport shrinks you. The plane compresses you. The system ignores you until you become a problem, and then it manages you until you go away.

Everyone feels this. Everyone resents it. Everyone pretends it's fine because the alternative is what, exactly? A boat?

But it's not normal. It's not inevitable. It's not the cost of doing business in a complex world. It's a system that stopped caring about the people it moves, and started caring only about moving them efficiently and profitably.

Flying didn't get worse by accident. It got optimized. And the optimization function doesn't include you.

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For all my complaining, I know I'm blessed to fly at all. I didn't get on a plane until I was a teenager. But gratitude doesn't mean silence. You can appreciate something and still push it to be better.