Tycoon class

The airlines apparently ignore the resentment felt by those, especially older people, who yearn for the relative comfort of travel in business class accommodations but can't afford the tariff. Of if they can afford it, are resentful at their complicity in the piracy. The traveler to Geneva by business class is accepting a surcharge of about $475 dollars per hour of travel. To pay $475 per hour to permit you to stretch your legs or to lean back in your seat an extra 15 degrees is resented as idolatrous indulgence. It is the equivalent of paying not $200 for a hotel room, but $1,800, because it is 25 percent larger. "Why do you travel third class?" I once asked an urbane Austrian intellectual who bridled at self-indulgence. "Because," he said, "there is no fourth class."

The late William Rickenbacker, the inventive and witty son of the war ace and president of (the late) Eastern Airlines, proposed 40 years ago a sensible way to permit the traveler a range of choices and the airlines their deserved profit. The ongoing mistake, he reasoned, is the airline's serving simultaneously as carrier and as marketer. The way to go, he counseled, is for the airline to auction its space in great blocks. "Who will pay $20 million for space on 5,000 Eastern Airlines flights, New York to Miami, Jan. 1 to July 1? ... Do I hear $22 million? Going for $21.5 million, going ... gone."

Let the wholesaler then sell the tickets for whatever price he can get, which takes into account the urgency of the flight and the comfort level. That broker would send you business class to Geneva for $100 -- if the seat you occupy would otherwise go empty.

The wholesale broker could, without inflicting pain, vary the price of an airplane passage, taking into account all relevant factors. As it stands now, the traveler burns with resentment at being asked to pay six times the cost of the lesser ticket.

But the problems of the business class traveler aren't likely to arrest the attention of our governors, and elderly people are difficult to organize. Perhaps this is one for the AARP.