The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) doesn't think so, or at least they don't adjust for this quality deterioration in their price indices for air transportation. This is worth noting in the context of a NYT article about the increasing percentage of air travelers who are involuntarily bumped from their flights. The failure to adjust for the deterioration in the quality of air transportation almost certainly leads this component of the consumer price index (CPI) to understate inflation. While there has been a concerted effort within the economics profession to find ways in which the CPI might overstate inflation, and to force the BLS to adjust its measures accordingly, there has been much less interest in examining ways that it might understate inflation. The understatement at issue is not likely to be large in terms of the whole index, since the weight of air travel is less than 1.0 percent (this means that if the bias is 2 percentage points annually in air travel, the understatement for the CPI as a whole would be 0.02 percentage points), but many economists have made a big issue over very small biases in the opposite direction.
--Dean Baker