“The Golden Age of Travel Starts With You.”
The U.S. Department of Transportation has launched a promotional campaign centered around civility for air travelers, suggesting in part that air travelers “dress with respect” during their flights.
Titled “The Golden Age of Travel Starts With You,” the program appears to center around five main pillars: helping pregnant women and elderly passengers with their carryon bags, dressing with respect, keeping control of children, and saying please and thank you, both broadly and specifically to flight attendants.
The accompanying video started off showing promotional and advertising footage from air travel in the mid-20th Century (some even depicted propliners popular in the 1950s) before morphing into a depiction of “modern” travel shown largely from passenger cell phone videos of barefoot passengers and onboard altercations.
The department cited relatively outdated data surrounding passenger incidents onboard commercial flights, pointing to a now four-year-old year-over-year increase in passenger incidents onboard flights from 2020 to 2021, when mask mandates were still in effect. The DOT also cited a 2021 statistic about physical incidents against flight attendants. Also noted was a 400% increase in outbursts since 2019, but the year 2024 itself counted only double the number of incidents compared with 2019, suggesting that a five-year increase trend was well past its peak by 2024.
In an August 2024 release by the Biden DOT, the department noted that incidents had fallen by more than 80% from their peak in 2021, but remained too high. It stated that the FAA had increased the number of incidents referred to the FBI for additional investigation.
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It’s worth noting that the DOT campaign is a promotional campaign, rather than an attempt to make any regulatory changes regarding the enforcement of passenger behavior onboard commercial flights. The DOT recently elected not to regulate how airlines reimburse passengers for expenses during delay situations, saying that consumers could instead choose airlines with better policies to accommodate them in the event of flight delays or cancellations.
Passenger behavior isn’t the only way air travel has significantly changed since the decades depicted in the DOT’s campaign video. The real cost of air travel—until the late 1970s only within the budget of the very wealthy—has significantly dropped, putting flying within reach of most Americans. Airlines have adjusted to a much more competitive environment by reducing passenger space, cutting perks and amenities, and introducing software that fills flights so efficiently that it’s rare to find even a handful of empty seats, even on low-demand days.
In short, it may be fantastical for the DOT to suggest passenger behavior and fashion sense to match that of promotional videos from the 1950s, when the air travel experience has changed so vastly in the decades since.
Passengers who might wish to wear a sport coat or suit jacket on their flight will find that the coat closets that once existed for them have disappeared in favor of more passenger seats. Hat racks that doubled as stowage for pillows and blankets have also disappeared (as have the pillows and blankets themselves from economy class on most domestic flights), turned into massive overhead bins that still offer too-little-space on full flights for everyone to stow their bag, which has become a flashpoint among fliers. Lavatories that once had electric shavers and tiny airline-branded bars of soap now have sinks so tiny they’re difficult to use without splashing on your clothes.
Airlines have responded to the deregulated environment that dictates passengers only pay for what’s important to them. Passengers can have the space and amenities that once came included in their ticket, but they now must pay extra for them—which adds to the overall frustration of travel.
It’s also important to explain that most airlines already have policies requiring passengers to dress—as the DOT puts it—with respect. The contract of carriage for most U.S. carriers allows them to deny boarding to passengers with clothing that is overly revealing or contains offensive or upsetting messages or images.
