What facilitated the change in the crowds at American airports?

Cheaper and cheaper flights, Social Media makes people travel a lot more imo, discount airlines, credit cards with travel perks, etc

Lots of things.

It will be an increasingly connected world, its not going to "get better"

Budget airlines.

Budget airlines are awesome though, so I'm not complaining.

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Atlanta

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Any flight from New Orleans through Atlanta is always interesting.

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Flying isn’t a cheap activity and certainly isn’t getting cheaper.

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But it *has* gotten cheaper, and it's not just due to the ULCC (Spirit, etc.)

Your perception is probably more shaped around what time you're leaving and on what day. Sunday afternoons and Monday mornings, outbound ATL was pretty much just people schlepping about for a job, like me. The inbound Thursday afternoons were more of the same. IAH is still clearly employed people (only hit terminals C & E, which isn't RJs or ULCC). The gate crowd heading to San Pedro Sula will always look the same, no matter where you're launching from...

That said, neither ATL or IAH have the shite-swarm of humanity that was JFK among domestic airports.

Southwest upper management refers to them as miracle flights. 43 get on with wheelchairs and half can walk off. The new seating groups and assignments are supposed to curb some of that. That sounded like their intention anyway.

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You can ALWAYS tell when you are approaching a gate with a flight headed to Louisiana.

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Usually marked by a week of saying we need to move. It's always the depressing icing on the cake of ending vacation. Returning home (usually to miserable Louisiana summer heat) from a week of hiking in some national park to see the pitiful state of affairs at the gate.

Miraculously, 90% of the passengers boarding in MSY in a wheelchair are healed in midair and deplane without assistance.

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There will be 43 occupied wheelchairs parked in front of the ticket desk. Any city, NO, Shreveport, BTR doesnt matter.

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Unless you’re on a $1,090 flight to ellick with half the US Military.

This puzzles me weekly.

Seems like the dumbest most clueless people are always in the airport blocking the aisles and going down the wrong TSA security lane.

For a while flying was "democratized" by Southwest because it was half price of United, American, etc... and a bunch of suburbanites that rarely flew were now zipping around the country in their jammies and house shoes (and with their pillows, cant leave home for a 90 minute flight to Saint Louis without your pillow!!!). But that' not the case anymore.

I avoid the "suburban" airlines like the plague anymore because despite not being cheaper, they culturally attract clueless travelers.