Airports will be busy again this Christmas. According to Kayak data, domestic flight searches are up 155 percent compared to 2020, though they are still 43 percent lower than in 2019.

Fortunately, we continue to enjoy the gift of decreasing airfares. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that since 2016, airfares have decreased in price from an index value of 270.9 to 203.8, or 24.8 percent.

Since we buy things with money but pay for them with time, we prefer to analyze the cost of airfares using time prices. To calculate the time price, we divide the nominal price by the nominal wage. That will give us the number of hours of work required to earn enough money to buy an airplane ticket.

We can calculate the time prices using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. They report that the nominal blue-collar hourly wage increased by 21.5 percent from $21.72 in 2016 to $26.40 in 2021.

It took 12.47 hours to earn enough money to buy the average airplane ticket in 2016. Today, it takes just 7.72 hours. That’s a decline of 38.1 percent.

For the same amount of time working, you can get 61.6 percent more airfares today than in 2016. Flying abundance has been growing at a compound annual rate of around 10.7 percent a year. At this rate, we get twice as many flights every 7.22 years.

Excerpt from our forthcoming book, Superabundance.