In 1976, the president of United Airlines made a number of predictions about what air travel would look like in 50 years—the impossibly futuristic year 2026. And if you take a quick peek at a calendar you may notice we’ve somehow arrived in that distant time.
United’s president, Richard J. Ferris, got some things right, like the idea that the U.S. government would deregulate the airline industry. But he also got a lot wrong, including the idea that there would only be three major airline carriers and that supersonic jets would be common by the 2020s.
The predictions by Ferris appeared in an article for the Chicago Tribune which was syndicated in newspapers across the country. The article opened with quite a bold statement in which Ferris insisted that “had American aviation evolved as swiftly as the computer industry, only nine years would have passed between the Wright Brothers flight and manned satellites.”
Commercial air travel in the 1970s was regulated by the government, restricting everything from the routes that could be opened to the prices that could be charged. Ferris predicted in 1976 that the airline industry would be deregulated by 2026 but he wouldn’t have to wait nearly that long. The Airline Deregulation Act passed in 1978.
What would come with deregulation? First class will have been eliminated, according to Ferris, which was arguably a more luxurious experience in the 1960s and 70s. You had things like high-end lounges or meals that included lobster. United’s first class meals in 2026 aren’t quite the same. He also predicted that discount fares would be abolished.
Ferris predicted that United would be boarding an average of 1 million passengers per day. United flies roughly half that on an average day.
And then there were the planes. Ferris imagined a fleet that would include many supersonic jets and double-decker planes, according to the article:
By the year 2026, Ferris predicts his carrier will be equipped with 800 aircraft, including 500-seat supersonic jets for international flights and super wide body, double-decked planes with 1,700 seats for long-haul service.
The latter will be so huge they will require 20 landing gear units to support 1.5 million pounds gross weights. But for shorter haul service in dense markets, 800-seat, double decked air buses will dominate the field.
It’s not hard to see why Ferris believed supersonic jets were the future of commercial air travel. The Concorde’s first flight was in 1969 and it was introduced in January 1976, just a couple of months before Ferris’s predictions would appear in print.
Ferris predicted that a flight from Chicago to New York would cost $430. You can get a flight on Frontier for under $100 today. If you fly United, a round-trip ticket will set you back about $200. He predicted that a flight from Chicago to San Francisco would be $820. That will actually run you about $300. He imagined that a flight from New York to Honolulu would be $1,600. And that’s actually about $600 in 2026.
But Ferris did imagine those prices are simply going to be high because of persistent inflation. And he said that prices for other goods would also be very expensive, with a “first class hotel room” costing about $225 per day compared to $36 in 1976. Ferris expected the average salary and benefits that would be paid to his employees would total $217,000 compared to $18,000 in 1976. In reality, it’s roughly half that, according to salary transparency websites that range from figures around $90,000 to $110,000.
From Ferris’ perspective in 1976, pilots of small aircraft in the United system would need to be paid about $480,000 in 2026. That’s definitely true for some of the most senior pilots, though starting salaries are closer to $100,000.
Prices for airfare have plummeted since 1976 and it’s not just because the rate of inflation was much lower from 1980 to today than was anticipated. Deregulation did improve competition and more airlines came on to the scene. There are four major carriers that control about 70% of the U.S. market—American, Delta, United, and Southwest—but there are also budget airlines where a deal can often be had.
Today, the CEO of United is Scott Kirby, a Trump guy who attended an inauguration dinner after his company donated $1 million to the authoritarian president. And even though he’s on board for Trump’s agenda, Kirby still gets heat from Trump’s far-right base for past statements about DEI.
At the end of the day, Ferris was just too optimistic about the trajectory of technological progress when he was making his predictions in 1976. Just because you can build something that works doesn’t mean it’s going to be our inevitable future. The Concorde started carrying passengers in 1976 and would be only one of two supersonic planes to ever enter service.
The Concorde was fast, zipping from Paris to New York in about 3.5 hours, with its fastest flight across the Atlantic clocking in at 2 hours and 59 minutes from New York to London in 1996. That’s much faster than today, when a nonstop flight will take about 7 hours. But neither flight times compare to what futurists were imagining through the latter half of the 20th century. They predicted a flight from New York to London would take just one hour.
The high cost and safety concerns after a high-profile crash in 2000, killing all 109 people on board and four on the ground, would plague the Concorde until it ultimately flew for the last time in 2003. There are no supersonic flights carrying passengers today and it seems unlikely that we’ll see that happen in the near future.
We’ve seen this play out in countless futuristic visions from the 20th century. We have invented flying cars, but they’re not something that the average American can buy today. We’ve invented jetpacks, but nobody is using them to go to work. And we’ve invented supersonic passenger jets, even flying them commercially for decades. But the future is tough to predict.
Inventing something does not mean that it will gain broad acceptance for a host of different reasons. And if Ferris were still around we would love to ask him about his old prediction. Unfortunately he died in 2022. That’s the other thing about the future, eventually we all personally run out of it.
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