Inside Airline Cockpits (Some Sunday Context) w/ Ganesh Sitaraman
This Day in Esoteric Political History
Jody Avirgan & Radiotopia
4.6 • 982 Ratings
🗓️ 1 June 2025
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Today, another in our "Some Sunday Context" series, where we bring you new conversations and episodes from the archives that try to help us make sense of life here in 2025. Nathan Fielder's "The Rehearsal" -- unexpectedly -- has many of us thinking about airline safety and aviation policy. His show is concerned with the interpersonal dynamics inside a cockpit, but the larger context is of an industry that has been deregulated, degraded, and ignored to the point where, well... flying really sucks. So, today we bring you an episode we did in December 2023 about the roots of airline deregulation.
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It’s December 17th. This day in 1978, holiday travelers are flying around the country under a regulatory system that was about to come to an end. The next year, the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 would kick in.
Jody, NIki, and Kellie are joined by Ganesh Sitaraman of Vanderbilt to discuss how the act changed the competitive structure for airlines — and in turn led to a degradation of service, reliability, and the glamour of flying.
Ganesh’s new book is “Why Flying is Miserable… And How To Fix It.”
Here’s our holiday book gift guide! https://thisdaypod.substack.com/p/a-this-day-books-and-merch-gift-guide
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to this day, a history podcast from Radiotopia. |
| 0:06.6 | And this is our Some Sunday context series. |
| 0:09.8 | Jodi Abergand here, we are bringing you episodes on Sundays that try and help us make sense of life here in 2025. |
| 0:17.1 | Some are new conversations, some are favorites from the archives. |
| 0:20.7 | Before we get going, a quick plug for our newsletter, thanks to everyone who subscribes and shares it. |
| 0:26.0 | We also have merch and lots more on our website, thisdaypod.org. |
| 0:30.6 | I do need to update the merch to reflect the name change, though, that's on my list for the summer. |
| 0:35.0 | Also, thanks to everyone who has been writing reviews of the show |
| 0:37.9 | on Apple Podcasts and just in general spreading the word about the show. If you want to help us grow, |
| 0:43.0 | that is a great way to do it. Anyway, today, some Sunday context about airline travel and what |
| 0:49.5 | happens aboard airplanes. I'm not sure if you've seen the latest season of comedian Nathan Fielder show |
| 0:55.5 | The Rehearsal, but the show, which is ostensibly about how humans talk to each other and the |
| 1:01.3 | very awkward way in which Fielder can and cannot find emotional connection with the people around |
| 1:06.7 | them, it basically became a season about airline safety, particularly how in a cockpit, pilots |
| 1:13.0 | don't often communicate well at critical moments. Fielder has weirdly become both a licensed |
| 1:18.5 | pilot and an advocate for airline safety. Maybe you saw him on CNN with Wolf Blitzer talking aviation. |
| 1:25.1 | What a world. But all of us on the podcast watched it and like many people |
| 1:28.9 | have many thoughts. I think Fielder is brilliant and this season made me squirm and frankly it made |
| 1:34.9 | me ask some deep ethical questions about what he's up to and the role of the documentary filmmaker. |
| 1:40.7 | I think he crossed the line a few times in a way that I'm still thinking through. But I suppose |
| 1:45.4 | that's the point of art to make you a little uncomfortable and I guess to make you think about |
| 1:50.8 | airline safety policy. And we have done an episode about that. It came out about a year and a half ago. |
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