Marshall here, welcome back to the realignment.

The show this week has a very Thanksgiving theme

speaking with the author Ganesh Chittaraman about his new book,

Why Flying is Miserable, and how to fix it.

If you're listening to this episode during your Thanksgiving travel, I'm sure you're experiencing

the following conditions. Number one, your actual

in-flight experience is horrible, it's cramped, you're way too stuck next to the

person next to you, and there are a variety of fees that have been added on to

make it harder and harder to actually

get where you're going in a straightforward price transparent way. Secondly, the

actual experience in the airport is horrible. We've got long lines, you have

delays, you have cancellations, and then of course finally you're experiencing the fact that in many parts of the country, like the city of Toledo that we speak about, you can't actually get flight service to the parts of the country you actually need to get to.

All of this is happening on top of an

airline industry that has gone through boom and bus cycles has had to constantly be bailed out.

Despite the fact that before COVID there were record profits in the industry itself.

So in Ganesh's telling, all this comes together

because of public policy choices that were made

during the era of airline deregulation in the 1970s and the 1980s.

The debate about how we move forward is going to once again stem back to policy choices

we can make in the hearing now to make things better.

So we'd love to hear what people think about their own experiences or alternative

approaches we can take as a country.

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