If you are interested in the history of the airline industry up through the 90s, you should read Hard Landing. It's an excellent overview of how we got to where we are in the United States, and the meat of the book is about deregulation.
Note that "deregulation" in the airline industry (primarily) means the government no longer controlled which airlines flew which routes. Before deregulation, route ownership was decided by an oligopoly that would and could set high-margin prices on routes since the control of those routes was a) assured by the government and b) agreed on by all the major carriers.
After deregulation, airlines competed primarily on price. While this lead to the hub-and-spoke system and the low-fare carriers we see today, it also meant that almost anyone could fly anywhere in the US and abroad for (relatively) little money and a high amount of safety.
As an aside, airline reservations technology benefited immensely from deregulation, and the carriers that controlled the reservations systems ended up killing of the carriers that didn't (see, for example, Eastern Airlines). If you're interested in the tech of the airline industry, I recently gave a talk about this at Systems We Love: https://systemswe.love/archive/san-francisco-2016/life-of-an...
Note that "deregulation" in the airline industry (primarily) means the government no longer controlled which airlines flew which routes. Before deregulation, route ownership was decided by an oligopoly that would and could set high-margin prices on routes since the control of those routes was a) assured by the government and b) agreed on by all the major carriers.
After deregulation, airlines competed primarily on price. While this lead to the hub-and-spoke system and the low-fare carriers we see today, it also meant that almost anyone could fly anywhere in the US and abroad for (relatively) little money and a high amount of safety.
As an aside, airline reservations technology benefited immensely from deregulation, and the carriers that controlled the reservations systems ended up killing of the carriers that didn't (see, for example, Eastern Airlines). If you're interested in the tech of the airline industry, I recently gave a talk about this at Systems We Love: https://systemswe.love/archive/san-francisco-2016/life-of-an...