In recent elections, candidates affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have made significant electoral gains. If the DSA gains real power, it will have to run real industries. The Democratic Socialists of America have never proposed running an airline, but the organization has a coherent enough theory of ownership to imagine what flying on DSA Air Lines would be like.

The DSA position is that the people who do the work should govern the enterprise. Most of what follows from that premise is achievable tomorrow, by any carrier willing to change who owns it. One commitment is not. DSA’s 2025 resolution binding members to anti-Zionism, applied honestly to an airline, does not narrow the business. It prevents the business from having planes.

Economics and physics govern how an airline treats a passenger. Economics is negotiable. Physics is not. Seat pitch, lavatory footprint, meal service, and hiring practices are all economics, and a worker council has genuine latitude to renegotiate all of them. In 1985, the average coach seat pitch on a U.S. carrier was approximately 35 inches; today it is closer to 30, and on some low-cost carriers, 28. That contraction did not happen because human femurs got shorter. It happened because a passenger compressed into 28 inches generates more revenue than one given 35. A council answering to flight attendants rather than a yield algorithm could reverse that math tomorrow, the same way it could leave the lavatory alone, fold the meal back into the fare, or fund an apprenticeship pipeline over a diversity office. None of this requires an act of aviation engineering. It requires a change of ownership, which is exactly what DSA Air Lines........

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