Either I'm just easily influenced and airline regulation is the latest thing I've been radicalized about, or this genuinely was a well-researched and conducted argument. Or maybe both!

This book walks through the earliest years of commercial flight (had no idea the Post Office was so involved those early days), the 40-year stretch of a regulated industry, the lead up and aftermath of deregulation in 1978, and multiple potential policy changes that can be enacted in the future to tackle the issues we're dealing with today. Nice, straightforward and concise layout that any schmuck who has zero experience learning about public policy (i.e., me) could follow.

I did learn a lot about this industry that typically goes right over my head (dodges tomato), like how pre-1978 the Civil Aeronautics Board would license out routes to private airlines such that popular routes between larger cities would turn such a profit that they would internally subsidize less-profitable routes between smaller, more rural cities. This ensured access throughout the country equally, rather than the literal "flyover country" we have today where state capitals like Cheyenne, Wyoming have to pay private airlines to service them. I also appreciated how "recent" it felt as well; as of the time I'm writing this, the book has been out for just shy of four months.

There were some questions I thought of while reading this, like how do other geographically-large countries with lots of internal domestic flights like Brazil or China approach regulation? Is the current "hub-and-spoke" model of airport routes better for the environment than a "every city has direct flights to every other city" approach? These and others were only mentioned in passing and weren't addressed enough to satisfy me, but for the length of book that this is, it was still very informative. I look forward to reading more from this books series if they're all written with this level of research and quality.