Boston and Bermuda
askthepilot.com30 points by dangle1 3 days ago
30 points by dangle1 3 days ago
It really is surprising how much air travel has changed during my lifetime. I remember feeling like kind of a loser in (public) high school back in the 90s when a select few kids would return from some exotic location for the winter break. But the consolation was that at least, like me, none of my friends went anywhere. There was one kid in my friend group who had flown once before. But if I recall correctly, it was to visit a divorced parent or something, so even though flying struck all of us as a crazy and aspirational way to travel, we all still felt bad for him.
By the time I was in my 20s (in the early 2000s), the situation was totally different. The most ridiculous: sometime in 2009, JetBlue had a deal, announced on radio, that you could purchase unlimited flights for 3 months for only $500. As my fiancee had moved to the western US for her medical school residency program, this was a godsend. I visited her every weekend... I don't remember if I took a full 12 trips, but it was more than 10. I would leave Boston immediately after work on Friday and then take a redeye and arrive back in Boston at 7am on a Monday. I haven't seen a deal like that in a long time, and flying has increasingly gotten worse since that experience, but it still is relatively affordable compared to my high school years.
American used to offer the AAirpass back in the 80's, you could pay around $250K and get an unlimited lifetime ticket. It gets brought up in the news occasionally, usually when American cancels the person's lifetime ticket, or to run a story about a guy with a craving for NY pizza and decides to fly into JFK for a day from another corner of the country.
Huh, different than my experience. In the early 90's when I was in college, I was flying back and forth between Rochester and Boston several times a year because it was only slightly more expensive than driving the six hours.
Great photo up top, of author's family members entering the "America[n]" airliner.
Not much meat to this article, but I do wonder how much lower prices were then in Bermuda. Almost everything needs to be imported and shipped over. Today, it is incredibly expensive. You can easily pay $30 for an incredibly mediocre breakfast (though cheaper options can be found, if you look).
[dead]