Commentary: Better dressed passengers won't bring back air travel's 'Golden Age.' Here's what will

Do we all need to dress better while flying? And watch our manners?

You might think so if you happened to catch that "Golden Age of Travel" video late last year, the one where U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy urges airline passengers to dress respectfully and behave more civilly.

In case you missed it: in the 90-second production, as Frank Sinatra croons his 1958 chart-topper "Come Fly With Me," well-dressed passengers dine on gourmet meals and sit in spacious well-padded seats aboard vintage propeller planes like the DC-7 and Lockheed Constellation. For anyone who remembers flying in the 1950s, it was nostalgic.

But not everyone enjoyed this stroll down memory lane.

The blowback was fierce, not least from the Universal Music Publishing Group, the copyright holder of Sinatra's song (the video has been deleted from the DOT website as a result but you can still find snippets online). Why should we bind ourselves in suits and girdles when air travel is so uncomfortable these days, social media commentators scoffed.

And they're right: airline travel is much less comfortable or enjoyable than it was in the 1950s and early 1960s. What was truly "golden" about travel back then was not how we airline passengers behaved or dressed, it was how the airline industry treated passengers.

Back then, airline cabins were much more comfortable. The seats were like flying La-Z-Boys, the headrests protected by freshly laundered white antimacassars. You got tons of legroom, equivalent to or better than today's first-class seats. There was no such thing as a middle seat. Planes were rarely full - many took off half-empty so you often had a row all to yourself.

Back then, before airlines were deregulated in the U.S., they were required, in the event of a cancellation or significant delay, to put you on a competing airline's next flight if that got you to your destination sooner than your original carrier (see: Rule 240). They even had to put you in first class if economy was sold out. Airlines would routinely pay for a hotel if you were stranded overnight and for meals and transportation to and from your hotel. You didn't have to beg for these amenities.

In the golden age of air travel airlines didn't overbook flights, no one was ever bumped. In the golden age of air travel ticket prices didn't change minute by minute like they do now. Fares were printed each month on the timetables. There were no cancellation fees or baggage fees or seat selection fees or any fees at all. Flights were rarely late because the skies were less crowded. No tarmac delays. In the days before the Jetway, you climbed boarding stairs right from the tarmac and as soon as everyone was buckled in, you proceeded directly to the runway and took off. At busy airports like JFK today, the departure queue can stretch to a conga line of 40 planes and waits of up to 90 minutes.

If the DOT wants to improve air travel, let's start with at least requiring a minimum amount of space between one row of seats and the next. Let's require some sort of compensation when flights are delayed or canceled due to a maintenance issue or anything else reasonably within the airline's control, like they have in Europe. Let's bring back Rule 240. Just before debuting the video, Duffy killed a proposal to pay airline passengers up to $775 for delays over three hours long.

And yet it doesn't hurt to dress up and be kind

That said, I have nothing against flyers dressing well or saying please and thank you more often, as the video advises. There can be tangible benefits.

Airline employees and their families are required to dress decently when flying for free, whether for business or pleasure, and they resent seeing passengers dressed in sweats and T-shirts or worse. I once worked for Eastern Air Lines and always wore the regulation suit, tie and well polished shoes when flying but one day I'd packed my tie in checked luggage. They usually put us in first class but not this day. "The way you're dressed you don't deserve to fly at all!" the gate agent sneered. I'm not making this up.

But it works both ways. Perhaps in solidarity, although it happens rarely, airlines do upgrade passengers to a better seat if they make some effort to look presentable. It happened to me once on United, me in my best navy blue suit (and tie), and on British Airways to my L.A. real estate agent, who never leaves the house without looking like the proverbial million bucks, and on Air Canada to my friend Richard, who asked the gate agent why he was upgraded and was told, "The station manager saw how well dressed you were and said upgrade that man." None of us had frequent flyer status in those airlines, the usual way people get upgraded.

And being polite and cooperative pays dividends too. I once sat next to a teenager who got upgraded to business class for switching his seat with an audibly angry economy class passenger.

My mother, who dressed me like Little Lord Fauntleroy when we flew, always insisted that I thank the crew and pilots when deplaning and I do so to this day. After all, flight attendants have feelings, too. "Imagine saying good morning to 200 people and not getting a single good morning back," one once told me after I was the one passenger who wished him good morning back.

After takeoff, he approached me in my economy class seat and asked me to gather my things and follow him toward the front of the plane.

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This story was originally published March 16, 2026 at 3:35 AM.