It’s shown that he kind of grows up like a normal person, in the decades that he would have been growing up in; he was in college in the 1970s, for example. They were trying to make it as realistic as possible for their audience, so they couldn’t pretend that air travel wasn’t a thing people were doing.

Another example is boats. They could have just told him that boats didn’t exist.

But pretending the technology doesn’t exist presents its own problems, so we have to imagine that they decided to instill fears instead.

For the drama of course. Reality tv would do that movie in a heartbeat if it was legal and make extreme situations that he couldn't leave everytime he tried for ratings.