Flying Standby

One thing I'm nostalgic for is flying standby. There was a simple solution to flying for less money. You could just show up at the airport and wait for an empty seat. Then you could pay a token amount for an otherwise wasted seat on a flight.

Times have changed. Thanks to hijackers and terrorists, nobody can just walk into an airport. In order to walk into an airport, people are required to purchase an airline ticket. Problem is, all the cheap seats are nonrefundable. In order to fill empty seats, airliners and cheap passengers have to play a game with non refundable tickets. Guess that flight. I don't care the exact time of the flight, I just want to get there today. Why can't I just show up and board a flight?

I respect paying airline customers. They are the people who actually pay for my airline tickets. In an ideal world, the number of paying passengers would equal the number of seats and there would never be any cheap seats for cheap passengers like me. However, things don't always go as planed and airliners take off with empty seats. Having a passenger pay part of the price of a ticket is still better than having an empty seat.

The most efficient way to fill up empty seats is for everyone who wants a seat to form a line and wait for a seat. It is not efficient for cheap passengers and their airlines to try to predict which fights will and will not have empty seats.

I respect the idea of airport security and I don't like the idea of someone just showing up and wandering through the airport. How about allowing prescreened passengers to fly standby. We could give them a choice. Buy a ticket or be searched. They would be 'doubly safe". Then, we could fill up our airliners and everyone could get their money worth (to the limitations of the real world costs of airliner travel)