Air travel has gotten MUCH slower in the last 20 years. I need to show up at Logan about 2 hours before takeoff for a 90 minute flight to DC. The terrorists slowed flights down much more than fuel economy on all but the longest flights.
Absolutely. The gains that could be achieved by flying even twice as fast isn't much compared to the time we could save if we could get to, from and through airports the same way that we move around subway systems: by carrying our own luggage, no check-in, no registration, no reservations, no security, no forced shopping malls, waiting 10 minutes for connections, not several hours.
A 2 hour flight, e.g. from NYC to CHI, is often 6-8 hours with all the surrounding nonsense. Getting from Manhattan to JFK, Newark or even LaGuardia is easily 1-2 hours, waiting in the airport, going through security etc. is another 1-2 hours. Getting through the destination airport from the moment the plane touches down and until you are actually leaving the airport with your luggage is rarely less than an hour. And then the transport into the city is another hour.
With transatlantic flights it's often 14-15 hours or even easily 20 hours if you need a connecting flight in one end, although the connecting flight is "just a one hour flight", because of all the waiting between flights.
Flying is great. Everything around it is terrible.
In the 60s and 70s every bag was searched by hand in front of you on international flights. We're actually no worse off than those days.
In the late 90s you could roll up to the airport 15 minutes before an international flight, walk to the plane hardly breaking stride for customs, fly to your destination, and walk out to the taxies -- again hardly breaking stride for customs.
You don't go through customs at all for an outbound flight. If you're a non-citizen/permanent resident, you just get an immigration officer to stamp your passport.
If you're leaving the US, things probably aren't much more involved at the destination. It's when you come back that you have to deal with pissy immigration and customs officers.
If you're flying from a Canadian airport to the US (from Ottawa or Toronto at least) you actually clear US customs while still in Canada. This is actually very convenient as before they started this clearing customs in the US would involve a long line if many fights were arriving at the same time.
You generally need to convince the airline you're allowed into the destination country, because if you're stopped at the border, they're responsible for you.
In many -- probably most -- countries there is some kind of outgoing border control for any international flight -- not necessarily "customs" but something similar. (I was actually detained briefly at customs leaving Sydney for Japan in the 90s. Never found out why.)
That's not immigration though. In the majority of cases, that's done automatically in the background by cross-referencing your itinerary and citizenship against TIMATIC. The passenger never does anything.
I was a little young to comment on air travel before 1974 from personal experience, but I do recall international travel by ship in 1970 and, again, border controls were quite tight.
There are ways you can make many parts of the US experience better -- PreCheck, Clear, etc. if they are available at the airports you travel through. This has saved me a LOT of time at SFO and SJC.
For international flights returning to the US, at this point Global Entry is almost a must. Last return flight MUC -> SFO, if we didn't have Global Entry, we would have been in line for at least an hour. GE kiosk? A couple of minutes including needing to type in my flight details.
As PreCheck becomes more popular, I suspect some parts of flying will become a bit smoother for people overall.
