Remember when all you had to worry about on a plane was hijackers flying you to Cuba?

If someone gave you the choice of flying to the West Coast in the year 2023 or the year 1973, who even hesitates?

In 1973 you had far more legroom, the food was much better, the stewardess made you feel special, they didn’t leave you sitting on the runway for six hours with no explanation, and the planes weren’t bumping into each other like drunken wedding guests at the buffet line.

The only thing you had to worry about was getting hijacked and flown to Cuba.

I’m trying unsuccessfully to think of any other industry of which this would be true, where in a half century, not only were there no material advancements, but in nearly every phase the finished product has gotten much worse.

A Mustang Mach E is light years better than the sorry, rattling and gurgling Mustang II. No one today has ever heard of “snow” on their television sets, or a dial on the back of the set known as the “vertical hold.” A lot of sets weren’t even color.

In 1973, a “bird strike” was a pitch thrown by Jim Palmer. Planes weren’t returning to the airport after 20 minutes because a laptop battery had exploded or because some politically motivated idiot took offense at being denied the freedom to leave his seatbelt unbuckled.

Fifty years ago, if there was a disturbance, the boilerplate was “alcohol is believed to have been a factor.” Today it’s “Fox News was believed to be a factor.”

Maybe the one thing you can say is that air travel today is cheaper. And maybe that’s the problem. In 1973, airline tickets came in at a price point that tended to exclude the clinically insane.

To fly, you needed a good job, a sense of responsibility and a genuine reason to fly beyond hooking up with the cocktail waitress from Waco that you met in the dog food aisle at Walmart.

In 1973, pilots and air traffic controllers seem to have been educated in this particular law of physics: Two planes cannot simultaneously take off and land on the same runway at the same time.

Or maybe they’ve been told that but don’t believe it and feel the need to try it to see for themselves — like all those talk radio hosts who bragged about not being vaccinated six weeks before their funerals.

And you never would have seen this actual headline from The Washington Post: “No, unruly passenger: You can’t physically open a plane door midflight.”

Remember when self-help was defined as teaching people to develop a positive attitude or do their own taxes? Now valuable, carbon-sequestering trees are being killed so newspapers can report that opening the cabin door of a flying aircraft is a bad idea. I really hate to say it, but we’re doomed.

Calling it a “repeated scene in the skies,” the Post wrote, “Most recently, a man tried to open an emergency exit door during a cross-country flight on Sunday before attempting to stab a flight attendant with a broken spoon.”

Wait, a broken spoon? Oh dear Lord. You know what this means. Passengers will no longer be trusted with cutlery, so they will be forced to pull at their food with their fingers like a cabin full of starving raccoons.

The story continues that “The 32-year-old man allegedly removed the plastic covering over the handle of the emergency exit and pulled the handle; he later told police that he wanted to be recorded so he could share his thoughts about the coronavirus vaccine.”

Whatever happened to a Letter to the Editor? So this is political discourse today. If you have a point to make about government overreach as it pertains to the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, open the door of a jet aircraft.

Which the Post says can’t be done due to extreme pressure. OK, but don’t tell D.B. Cooper. What do you think this is, 1973?

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Man threatening flight attendant reminder that flying has gotten worse