The Median American Adult Has Not Flown in the Past Year

The latest in President Biden’s scattershot attacks on industries he doesn’t like:

As is common with these attacks, this feels populist-y. It feels like he’s standing up for working families who just want to be able to sit with their kids.

The problem with that narrative: The median number of flights taken by American adults in a given year is zero.

Gallup has been asking Americans how many flights they take in a year since 2003, and the proportion saying they have taken at least one flight has never been over 50 percent. In 2021, 62 percent said they had never flown at all. If more than half of Americans have not flown in the past year, the median American has not flown in the past year.

These survey results are similar to those from Airlines for America, the industry’s trade group. It found that 44 percent of Americans said they had flown in 2022, meaning 56 percent had not, so the median is, again, zero. It found that 87 percent of Americans had flown at least once in their lives, but air travel is just not an issue that affects most people most of the time.

The proportion of people who say they have flown in the past year is way higher than it was before the industry was economically deregulated in 1978. Between 1971 and 1977, the average proportion of Americans who reported flying in the past year was only 24 percent, according to the Airlines for America survey. In 2020, during the Covid pandemic, it was 22 percent. It takes a once-in-a-century pandemic to get today’s air-travel numbers back to what they were under federal micromanagement.

Deregulation drove lower fares through competition and was supported across the political spectrum (Stephen Breyer was a major force behind it, and Jimmy Carter signed it into law). It made air travel accessible to non-business, middle-class travelers. But it didn’t change the fact that, for many Americans, there isn’t much reason to fly.

If someone has a job that doesn’t require much travel (i.e., most jobs in retail, manufacturing, construction, government, health care, education, and agriculture) and lives near his or her family, there isn’t much reason to fly often. According to the Census, 91.7 percent of American households have access to at least one car, and driving can get the job done for most trips. Families going on vacation will often prefer to drive rather than try to wrangle kids onto an airplane and rent a car on the other end.

Biden’s real angle here is probably the fact that high-earning professionals who do fly often might be upset with him about his failure to erase their student-loan debt, because inconvenient things such as the U.S. code and the Constitution do not give him the power to do that. It’s easy to hate airlines, so picking on them could help with voters who have experience with them. But this isn’t a case of fighting for the common man against rapacious industry.