Here's some comment on modern airlines which I quite like:

"We can see it through the vapor of our breadth - in the clear night over Newfoundland a brilliant point of light hanging in Orion, then passing slowly overhead, a Boeing 747 bucking a hundred-mile-per-hour head wind westward.

Back in steerage where the package tours go, the fifty-two members of Old World Fantasy, a tour of eleven countries in seventeen days, are returning to Detroit and Windsor, Canada. Shoulder room is twenty inches. Hip room between armrests is twenty inches. This is two inches more space than a slave had on the Middle Passage.

...

The passengers are being slopped with freezing-cold sandwiches of slippery meat and processed cheese food, and are re-breathing the farts and exhalations of others in economically reprocessed air, a variation on the ditch-liquor principle established by the cattle and pig merchants in the 1950s.

...

Travellors in the row ahead, their chairs cranked back until Dr. Lecter can smell their hair, look back through the crack between seats. "We're trying to sleep up here."
"

Thomas Harris "Hannibal"