Has the typical cabin pressure in airliners changed in recent decades? Two or three decades ago, I would experience quite uncomfortable blocking of the eustachian tubes, which would noisily unblock and become blocked once more as the plane descended.

I haven't experienced that in recent years, in which I have been flying on considerably newer aircraft.

Is this likely to be a change in the cabin environment or my own physiology - that is, have cabin pressures generally increased so that changes during descent are less dramatic, or have I just become older and less susceptible to blocked ears?

Recent airliners such as the 787 and the A350 have much-touted higher cabin pressure levels; has there also been a general increase in standard cabin pressures over the years?
Let's take the Boeing 737 as an example: an airliner that first flew in 1967 and is still being produced, its variants—old to new—indeed show a trend of increasing pressurization capability.

Note that even the 1967 variant had an automatic controller for the cabin pressurization, and the 200Adv and the Classic shared the same max ceiling of FL370.

The better the engines and the aerodynamics are, the higher they'll fly, and the stronger the aircraft will be made to offer better cabin altitude. However stronger is now easier than in the past thanks to the materials engineering advancements.


  1/200 (7.5 psi) → 200Adv (7.8 psi) → Classic (8.65 psi) → NG (9.1 psi)


The higher those values, the lower (denser) the cabin altitude is, for a plane flying at the same altitude.

Those values are the limits, each variant will use lower values in the day-to-day operations to reduce the stresses.



Source of the figures: b737.org.uk