Bruce Cameron

Editor’s Note: The following column was originally published in 2009.

Today, you can fly on one of two types of airlines, depending on whether you’d rather go Chapter 7 or 11.

Before deregulation, air carriers didn’t go broke very often, and there were commercial routes to every airport in the world, including a direct flight from New York to a cow field outside of Duluth. Tickets were expensive, though, so the only people who were up in planes were the type of people who tended to look down upon others anyway.

That all changed in 1978, when Congress decided it was time to let air travel be en...