[justanorherhack]

You are blaming the wrong party. They’ve gotten that perspective from experience not thought vacuum. There are many industries, commercial airlines included that do not have competitive capitalist environments. There are typically 3-5 big players, typically heavily in bed with the gov whose incentives aren’t aligned. Telco, domestic automakers, insurance come to mind initially.

There is also a corporate greed, which is leaking into tech with commoditization, problem in America where fewer and fewer companies treat their employees as assets and rather treat them as cogs. People are loosing their tolerance.

[AlexandrB]

> There are typically 3-5 big players, typically heavily in bed with the gov whose incentives aren’t aligned.

Things are just as bad in big tech. Ever tried to get support from Google? Many modern companies cut customer support to the bare minimum.

Then there's stuff like the 23andMe saga (also on the front page of HN right now), where the company actively blames their customers for their fuck up.

[JohnFen]

Yep. Heck I am a part of the tech industry and have pretty much lost all trust in the tech industry. It's hard to see and experience widespread misbehavior without beginning to expect it.

[wbl]

The airlines are one of the few industries where almost everyone comparison shops for each and every purchase. The list of airline bankruptcies is very very long as are the new entrants.

Sure if you fly to some very small destinations you will have very limited choices, but almost definitionally that's a small fraction of the total trips.

[PaulHoule]

It's a very limited and stilted kind of competition. One of the few real bright spots is

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegiant_Air

which works on a fundamentally different model from other airlines (limited network, fewer flights per week.) It is getting harder and harder to see the difference between traditional airliners like Delta and "low cost" airlines like Southwest.

People do compare prices on competitive routes. Airlines, in the US at least, try pretty hard not to compete on quality and the mediocrity of the 737 is part of that. Every other commercial airliner built today has a modern fly by wire system which can accomplish what MCAS was supposed to do in a safe way. The 737 is noisy for its size

https://www.aviationfile.com/noise-pollution-levels-by-aircr...

not just in the passenger cabin and on the ground but particularly in the cockpit (years back I wrote a comment on an av blog about the noisy 737 and pilots joined in.) The 737 struggles to take off under good conditions and has to be grounded under conditions that other airliners handle easily. The 737 also lacks the anti-turbulence feature of the A320 which uses the fly-by-wire system to smooth out the ride.

People are so used to the dismal 737 and only somewhat better A320 that they have a hard time believing that modern airliners like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A220

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embraer_E-Jet_E2_family

can be much smaller but much more comfortable than the 737 but people who fly it become believers, the more people who get to experience them the more people will demand them. They cost less to operate too and being a little smaller could support a more efficient network just as 2-engine widebodies replaced 4-engine widebodies.