Neighbours up high

Economy class is a great equaliser. What better place to test your love of humanity?

Does travelling in the economic class provide a test for our manners? Jason Lee / Reuters

Airline travel, once the glittering preserve of those with homes in Monaco and the Hamptons, is now for most people a cramped ordeal, where seat backs, elbows and the rogue odours of too-close neighbours assault your personal boundaries.

The air is stratified: in economy class, the 99 per cent see their seat sizes slowly eroded by ageing American airlines scraping at increasingly thin slithers of operating profit, while the people up front recline in ever-greater comfort and are served John Dory in gravy and citrus-marinated palm hearts.

According to the survey of the worst habits of plane passengers, in The National yesterday, once we're in the air, many of us turn on one another over such irritations as putting the seat all the way back and hogging the armrest.

It seems that not only are many airline passengers uncomfortable, but they also lack empathy for their fellow-travellers. Human brotherhood is needed most in the belly of a Boeing.