Thirty years ago the concept of discount airlines was just forming. Economy seats weren't great, but there was plenty of leg room--as long as you didn't take a charter flight. Charters reduced the cost of flights by cramming the seats together and were run mostly by companies selling packaged tours. Then an Englishman named Freddy Laker decided to create a regularly scheduled airline offering cheap seats from the states to London, and the discount airline was born. It cost $500 for a round trip San Francisco to London.
Again, the efficiency of the internet market in which a great majority of buyers choose by price alone has created seating as tight as can be tolerated by reasonably-sized people traveling in steerage, er, economy class. Charter seating, the mere mention of which would once would cause travelers to wince in pain, is now the norm.
The efficiency of the Internet-driven market has not gone unnoticed by larger airlines, who have recently requested to be allowed to ignore truth in advertising laws. The ploy was designed to allow for the addition of initially undisclosed fees, which would take the efficiency out of the market. (You'd be lured in by a lowball advertised price, and would only get the fee totals after paging though the site, rendering price comparison engines useless.) They were denied by the DOT.
