Honestly, I will never wrap my head around how people can happily bring infants on any flight where you can expect people to try and sleep, it’s incredibly lucky if they don’t spend some of it screaming their heads off—I would be mortified if my choices were preventing hundreds of people from sleeping. But I’m not going to rant too hard about that.
Why on earth hasn’t any airline started marketing adult-only flights?
It seems like a complete no brainer to me, I would choose it every time and pay extra for it.
Disclaimer: I may or may not be on a 36h day with only an hour of sleep right now
There’s a spectrum, you can always charter a jet, and only allow other adults to join you on the charter. But that’s expensive.
As you pull in more and more strangers, you have to accept a broader spectrum of people’s lifestyles, including they need to move children.
From an airline perspective, it wouldn’t be a good look if you were excluding parents, so it would be a PR nightmare. Most people belong to families, even if they don’t have kids themselves, so a bad experience any member of their family had could reduce the amount of popularity your airline enjoy
However, it would be nice if airlines said, the back of the plane is the safest for children, which statistically it is, so children are only allowed to sit in the last 10 rows of the flight. That would be amazing
That would mean additional logistics and therefore costs for the airlines. So, no. As long as people accept being squeezed into cattle class and treated like cattle, the airlines have no incentive to change.
What extra logistics? Passenger birth dates are recorded at time of booking and with the exception of southwest, seats are assigned ahead of time. It would be trivial for the booking software to limit where certain age groups can be assigned. Most airlines already allow passengers with infants to board before everyone else so there’s time to deal with carseats/strollers.
Every airline already excludes young children from exit row seats, so clearly the logistics involved are already solved.
I’m not necessarily advocating for that policy, but I fail to see how it would be difficult to enact. The resulting discrimination lawsuits would probably be the most onerous part.