Airplanes became common in stages, but the real turning point for everyday travelers was the late 1950s through the 1970s. Before that, flying was expensive and reserved for the wealthy or well-connected. The introduction of jet airliners in 1958 and U.S. airline deregulation in 1978 together transformed air travel from a luxury into something most middle-class families could afford.
The 1930s: Airlines Become Viable Businesses
Commercial aviation existed in the 1920s, but early airlines survived on government mail contracts, not ticket sales. Planes were slow, loud, and carried only a handful of passengers. That changed with the Douglas DC-3, which first flew in December 1935. It was the first airplane that could turn a profit just by hauling passengers, without needing a government subsidy. As one airline executive put it at the time, it was “the first airplane in the world that could make money just by hauling passengers.”
The DC-3 was reliable and cheap to operate, and it became the workhorse of the young airline industry. But “common” is relative. In the late 1930s, flying was still something most Americans had never done. Tickets were expensive, flights were short-range, and airports were few. Air travel in this era was roughly equivalent to first-class rail: available, but not for ordinary budgets.
The 1940s and 1950s: Growth but Still a Luxury
World War II accelerated aircraft technology enormously. After the war, surplus military transports and newly trained pilots helped airlines expand their route networks. By 1946, Pan Am was flying Douglas DC-4s from New York to London in about 17 hours and 40 minutes, five days a week. Faster propeller planes like the Lockheed Constellation soon cut that to around 15 hours.
Passenger numbers grew steadily through the 1950s, but flying remained expensive. A coast-to-coast or transatlantic ticket cost the equivalent of several thousand dollars in today’s money. Most long-distance travelers still took trains or ocean liners. Air travel was common enough that people knew about it, but uncommon enough that boarding a plane still felt like an event.
1958: Jets Change Everything
The moment air travel shifted from niche to mainstream began on October 26, 1958, when Pan Am launched the first scheduled jet service from New York to Paris using a Boeing 707. That flight carried 111 passengers and made the trip in about eight hours. The 707 had nearly double the capacity and speed of the propeller airliners it replaced. A single jet could do the work of several older planes, which meant airlines could offer far more seats on popular routes.
The economics were transformative. With so many more seats to fill, airlines faced downward pressure on fares throughout the 1960s, often cutting prices below official agreements. Worldwide passenger miles exploded, growing from 75 billion annually in 1960 to 1.1 trillion by 1990. The jet age didn’t just make flying faster. It made flying cheaper, and cheaper meant more people could afford to try it.
By the mid-1960s, air travel had become the dominant way to cross the Atlantic. Ocean liner companies lost passengers so quickly that most converted their ships to cruise vessels or went out of business entirely. For domestic trips over a few hundred miles, planes were rapidly replacing trains as the default choice for business travelers.
1978: Deregulation Opens the Floodgates
Even with jets, the U.S. government tightly controlled which airlines could fly which routes and what they could charge. The Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 removed those restrictions, allowing carriers to compete freely on price for the first time. The results were dramatic.
According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, median round-trip fares fell 38 percent between 1980 and 2005 in inflation-adjusted terms, dropping from $414 to $256. Passenger traffic roughly tripled over the same period, rising from 254 million boardings in 1978 to 670 million in 2005. New low-cost carriers entered the market, hub-and-spoke networks connected smaller cities to the national system, and discount fares made flying accessible to people who had previously driven or taken buses.
This is the period when air travel truly became common in the way we understand it today. By the 1980s, flying was no longer remarkable. It was just how you got somewhere far away.
A Timeline of Key Thresholds
- 1935: The DC-3 makes commercial flight profitable without subsidies
- 1946: Postwar airlines begin regular transatlantic service
- 1958: Jet airliners double capacity and halve travel times
- 1960s: Falling fares bring air travel to the middle class
- 1978: Deregulation triggers price competition and a surge in passengers
- 1980s–1990s: Flying becomes routine for most Americans
How Global Adoption Differed
The timeline above is largely an American story. In Western Europe, mass air travel followed a similar but slightly later trajectory, with budget carriers like Ryanair and EasyJet driving a second wave of democratization in the 1990s and 2000s. In much of Asia, Africa, and South America, air travel didn’t become common for ordinary citizens until the 2000s or 2010s, as rising incomes and low-cost carriers expanded access.
Globally, the number of airline passengers crossed 1 billion per year in the late 1980s and surpassed 4 billion by 2017. What took decades in the United States happened in compressed form elsewhere, but the underlying pattern was the same: bigger planes, more competition, lower prices, more passengers.