Passengers on South African low cost carrier FlySafair were filmed during boarding, holding up South African banknotes, and and passing them forward over seatbacks along the aisle to the front. One man is collecting the cash, while everyone films.
It’s a gag everyone’s pulling here, with passengers appearing to pay their fares on board – like a South African minibus taxi, where riders often pass cash forward to the driver and change comes back. FlySafair, here, is the “taxi of the skies.”
South African humour: Passengers paying their fares on board FlySafair pic.twitter.com/YNPSASB3MT
— PSAFLIVE (@PSAFLIVE) December 15, 2025
This doesn’t show FlySafair literally collecting ticket payments onboard. If anything, FlySafair has explicitly moved away from onboard cash handling for purchases (they went cashless for inflight purchases from April 2024), which makes the cash‑passing gag even more obviously satire.
But did you know that several airlines used to sell tickets on board? Passengers would board the plane without tickets, and buy them in the air!
People Express passengers would go to the gate, pay for checked bags, and get a plastic, numbered, returnable boarding pass. The airline controlled capacity with these boarding passes – once you’ve handed out bas many as you have seats, everyone else has to wait for the next flight.
Then flight attendants came down the aisle selling tickets. Which of course raised the issue of, what if you didn’t or couldn’t pay? What if your credit card wouldn’t authorize?
You can’t be removed once you’re in the air, so payment issues had to be dealt with on arrival if at all. People Express couldn’t do real-time validation of credit cards in the air before inflight wifi connectivity, but most merchants weren’t validating cards really back then – they were imprinting cards and taking signatures. That meant the merchant was at risk for stolen cards, over limit cards, etc. Of course this was also long before the ‘cashless cabin’ era.
I remember the buy onboard model as a kid, but I also recall this wasn’t how all ticket purchases were handled, because flying on People Express as an unaccompanied minor (I loved buying a snack basket and a soda!) I know that I already had a ticket.
Pacific Southwest Airlines also let customers pay onboard if they didn’t buy tickets in advance, though this wasn’t as dominant as it was with People Express.
None of this is possible anymore with standard commercial air travel in the U.S., since you generally can’t get to the aircraft without being ticketed first (although you can go through checkpoints with a gate pass). Passenger data also gets pushed to the government in advance. You can’t take off with passengers who haven’t been cleared.
By the way, People Express is the first airline I know of that charged for first checked bags ($3). American was the first legacy U.S. airline to do it. Spirit though was a year ahead of them, and Ryanair in Europe did it even earlier.
As a teen, I used to board the Eastern shuttle from LGA to BOS and the FA trolley would come by with a credit card franking machine — remember embossed credit cards to buy the ticket inflight? (Sometimes they had to hussle before landing.) That was in the late 1970s, maybe into early 1980s.
When flying regional routes in southern Africa, please consider Airlink.
@L737 — It’s @Matt’s Delta bit, but for a different setting (and honestly, if anyone knows South Africa-based airlines, it’s one of the best, so it fits, though I think Matt’s bit may sorta be mocking Delta, because Delta thinks of itself as better than all else… so…)
I also remember some of the early shuttle routes selling tickets on board. Some also brought out another aircraft if they had more passengers than seats for a particular flight.
@PDT,
I also recall the Eastern Shuttle, in my case going between LGA and BOS while I was a student in Cambridge in the late 1960s. The “student fare” was $8 each way. There were no advanced ticket sales. You dropped your luggage on a cart, climbed the stairs to board the plane (originally Lockheed “Connies” and Electras, followed by specially configured 727s if I recall correctly).
At the time, most passengers paid with cash as credit cards were only beginning to become ubiquitous.
Interestingly enough, there were times after landing where disembarkation was delayed as the flight attendants finished collecting airfares!
@1990 — Nicely done! And I guess I never really thought of that from that perspective, ha. Maybe so, maybe so.
@MSPeconomist,
Part of Eastern’s advertising was “we’ll bring out another and another and another” to meet demand. I guess unless there were real extenuating circumstances, you were really guaranteed a seat on the LGABOS and LGADCA shuttles. It must have been a logistical nightmare in terms of having aircraft and flight crews ready on standby to meet demand, but it appeared to have really worked well. That having been said, the “shuttle” concept as it was, didn’t last that many years, nor did Eastern Airlines (which also had other issues).
I remember the first time I flew on UIA. The flight attendants actually walked down the aisle offering paid upgrades on the spot. They’d take cash right there and immediately move the passenger up front. At first it struck me as a little unusual, but later I checked the UIA website and learned that this was their standard procedure. This was all well before the war, of course.
Could you imagine doing this in the US today? Half the passengers on Spirit and Frontier would get a free flight and the airport police would be meeting planes at the gate nonstop.
In this nostalgia, I remember Air Florida. Not quite bob tickets, but the FA sold tickets at the desk, loaded the luggage and sold the buy on board iconic Rachael’s Brownies. They were paid about $12. an hour. A very low wage at the time.
Per Wikipedia, Air Florida was an American low-cost carrier that operated under its own brand from 1972 to 1984. $12 an hour was a very low wage at the time? Somebody must be smoking some good stuff. I didn’t reach that wage until 1987 after changing jobs a few times. In fact, in the spring of 1975 I was doing piece work on weekends while going to school and I was making over $6 an hour, which was more than my father was making per hour. After the piece work, I was back to making $3 an hour or less. Minimum wage was $3.35 per hour in 1984 so $12 is 3.58 times as much. That would represent a wage greater than $59 an hour in California as of today (minimum wage $16.50/hr.) which would be pretty good. Even half of that would be considered reasonable for someone without a degree (and would represent around 1,000 hours a year at $59 for the cabin crew members.)
@jns — Oh, cool, a needlessly comparative minimum wage discussion in 2025, pretending everything is ‘just fine,’ when it’s been stagnant at $7.25/hour since 2009, while we’ve seen record inflation, and a single healthcare episode would bankrupt most people in our country these days. Of course, housing is unaffordable as is food and few job prospects for the young and capable, lest we start a new war, or turn them against ‘the other’ to keep them occupied. We could try UBI, or not. (Who cares.) Meanwhile, the super-rich, who don’t actually ‘work,’ because they just ‘own,’ and earn off ‘owning,’ seem to want AI robots to replace eveyone else, and for the poors to ‘please die.’ Wild times. Anyway, yeah, Air Florida, what a concept!
Jns that was less than half at 80 hrs a month. Most fa’s were in the range of 2,000 a month at that time. I used air Florida because it was a convenient choice dca to pbi and it was the brownies that made my choice as I was on opm money and the brownies were exclusively air Florida.
I flew FlySafair, it’s a really nice airline for LCC. They were very well organized and efficient, I like how they requested that all passengers remain seated until their row was called following arrival – and they did stay in their seats. Since they were unloading from both ends, everyone was able to get their bags down and get out quickly no matter where their seats or bags might have been.
From that picture it looks like a Spirit flight from Detroit to Atlanta.
I remember flying People Express from DC to Gatwick a solo, 3-week bike tour when I was 28. We were well out over the Atlantic before the cart came down the aisle and took my cash payment for the ticket.
I had to make sure I had enough cash to pay for the return flight which became a problem when my wallet was stolen in Victoria Station the day before I was to return. I had a little cash left but not enough for the flight ticket so I went to the American embassy and an incredibly kind woman there offered me $60 in US cash for my personal check of the same amount. Then, after hearing my story and that I only had enough cash left to cover my bus fair home, the PeopleExpress flight crew gave me as much free food as I wanted.
Multiple random acts of kindness. Not sure that would happen any more 🙁
The lyrics from the 1960s song “Flyin’ High” includes these lines:-
“So, they took me to the LA airport
Laid twenty dollars in my hand
Well, I paid my fare, I’m in the air
Flyin’ back home again
(From “Electric Music for Mind and Body”, Country Joe and the Fish, lyrics from genius.com)
Its nostalgia for I time I never knew where you could just show up at an airport, hand over the money and get a flight. (LAX to SFO for less than $20 is also a bit of a steal!) Its almost as if terrorism was invented specifically to turn the entire flying experience into a form of regimented Hell.
Loved the $19 People Express flights to Newark; loved paying cash for those tickets; love that in the 1980s I could fly courier from JFK to Hamburg for $99 round-trip … all I had to do was find “Fat Marvin” somewhere near the gate and he’d write out a ticket by hand with his ballpoint pen and I’d fork over $100 and he’d give me back a dollar bill. I never knew what I was the courier for; all I had to do was deliver a thick sealed plastic envelope to whoever was there to meet me upon arrival. Those were the days!
And these days I never want to handle cash. How times change…
The video is hilarious.
@George Romey
Another “punching down” comment from the terminally online.