In 1976, the president of United Airlines made a series of predictions about what air travel would look like 50 years from now—the impossibly futuristic year 2026. If you take a quick look at the calendar, you can see that we have somehow reached that distant time.
Richard J. Ferris, president of United, got some things right, such as the idea that the U.S. government would defund the airline industry. But he got a lot wrong, including suggesting that there would only be three major carriers and that supersonic jets would be commonplace in the 2020s.
Ferris’s predictions appeared in an article for the Chicago Tribune that ran in newspapers across the country. The article opened with a rather bold statement by Ferris that “If American aviation had developed as rapidly as the computer industry, only nine years would have passed between the Wright Brothers’ flight and manned satellites.”
In the 1970s, commercial air travel was regulated by the government, limiting 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 won’t have to wait nearly that long. In 1978, the Airline Regulation Act was passed.
What will deregulation result in? First class will be eliminated, according to Ferris, a more luxurious practice in the 1960s and 70s. There were things like high class lounges or food includes lobster. Not United’s first-class meals in 2026 exactly the same. He also predicted that the discounted fare will be canceled.
Ferris predicted that United would average 1 million passengers a day. United is flying rough half of that on an average day.
And then there were the planes. According to the article, Ferris envisioned a fleet of multiple supersonic jets and biplanes:
By 2026, Ferris predicts the carrier will have 800 aircraft, including 500-seat supersonic jets for international flights and super-wide-body, 1,700-seat double-deckers for long-haul service.
The latter will be so large that 20 landing gear will be required to support the combined weights of 1.5 million pounds. But for shorter-haul service in busy markets, 800-seat, double-decker airbuses will dominate the field.
It’s not hard to see why Ferris believes supersonic jets are the future of commercial air travel. Concorde made its first flight in 1969 and it was introduced January 1976Ferris’ predictions are only a few months away from appearing in print.
Ferris predicted that a flight from Chicago to New York would cost $430. Today, you can get a flight on the Border for under $100. If you fly United, a round-trip ticket will set you back about $200. He predicted a flight from Chicago to San Francisco would cost $820. It will actually save you about $300. He figured a flight from New York to Honolulu would cost $1,600. And that’s actually about $600 in 2026.
But Ferris imagined that these prices would simply be higher because of persistent inflation. And he said the prices of other goods would also be very high, with a “first-class hotel room” costing about $225 a day, compared with $36 in 1976. Ferris expected the average salary and benefits to be paid to its employees would be $217,000, compared with $18,000 in 1976. $90,000-$110,000.
From Ferris’s 1976 perspective, pilots of small aircraft in the United system should be paid about $480,000 in 2026. This is definitely true for some of the top pilots, although starting salaries are closer to $100,000.
Since 1976, airline ticket prices have fallen dramatically, and not just because the rate of inflation has been much lower than expected from 1980 to the present. Deregulation improved competition and more airlines came on the scene. There are four major carriers that control about 70% of the US market – American, Delta, United and Southwest – but there are also budget airlines where a deal can often be found.
Today, United’s CEO is Scott Kirby, a Trump man inaugural dinner after his company donated $1 million to the authoritarian president. And while he’s on Trump’s agenda, Kirby still is takes heat From Trump’s far-right base for past statements about DEI.
At the end of the day, Ferris was overly optimistic about the trajectory of technological progress when he made his predictions in 1976. Just because you can build something that works doesn’t mean it’s our inevitable future. The Concorde began carrying passengers in 1976 and would be one of only two supersonic aircraft to ever enter service.
Concorde was fast, flying from Paris to New York in about 3.5 hours, and its fastest transatlantic flight was 2 hours and 59 minutes from New York to London in 1996. This is much faster than the current non-stop flight which takes around 7 hours. But no flight time compares to what futurists envisioned in the second half of the 20th century. They predicted that flying from New York to London would just take time an hour.
After a high-profile crash in 2000 that killed 109 people on board and four on the ground, high cost and safety concerns would haunt the Concorde until its last flight in 2003. Today, there are no supersonic passenger flights, and it seems unlikely that we will see this happen in the near future.
We’ve seen this play out in countless futuristic visions of the 20th century. We invented flying cars, but they are not something the average American can afford today. We invented jetpacks, but nobody uses them to get to work. We invented supersonic passenger jets, and even flew them commercially for decades. But predicting the future is difficult.
Inventing something does not mean that it will be widely adopted for various reasons. If Ferris were still around, we’d love to ask him about his old prediction. Unfortunately, he He died in 2022. That’s another thing about the future, eventually we all get rid of it personally.
