Back in the late 1990s (still in the Air Force), we (in the vault business) got in a chat one day on the topic of air travel. There were four of us....mid-30s to mid-50....two AF, two contractors.
Air travel, for those who weren't in the era....in the 1960s/1970s...was special. Customers were respected....airline folks were respected.
Nothing ever ran on-time....no one cared.
Bags rarely got lost.
The food on the plane was crap, but you didn't really care.
Guys carried two or three shot bottles with them on the plane...mixing up their own drinks.
The Dallas Airport was regarded as state-of-the art, and some discussed marvel of society.
Then we came to airline travel there by the late 1990s.
Nothing ever ran on-time, but we seemed to count every lost minute.
Bags were a one-in-three-hundred situation...where as a minimum they were delayed two days or more. One of the contractors had lost three bags on three separate trips (single year).
Guys consumed a fair amount of booze in the airport lounges at crazy prices for cocktails.
The Dallas Airport was considered old and antique-like. JFK Airport was considered a disaster. Denver and Atlanta were noted as Taj Mahal-like.
But we came to this odd aspect at the end.....there were so many people traveling by plane....cooked-up on medication....that you could never be sure of behavior or attitude. Maybe they were mixing medication with booze, but the end result was becoming a problem.
It's an odd perception. Before Covid, I traveled a good bit...mostly internationally (avoiding the US), and you rarely (if ever) ran into medicated people.
Strictly a US thing? I often wonder about that.
