Air rage, elite seats and economy passengers: it’s a class struggle

You’ve been sitting for ages at the boarding gate, waiting to get on your flight. At last the airline’s representative announces that boarding can begin. “All rich people are now invited to take their lovely, comfy seats in first class,” she coos. “Would the poor people please wait: you will be called to your cramped, smelly seats when we’re good and ready.”

As you make your way to the economy section, at the tail end of the aircraft, you spot well-heeled executives in Savile Row suits and Versace dresses, reclining cosily in their extra-wide seats, tall glasses of Bollinger in hand, looks of smug privilege on their Botoxed faces, their Christian Louboutin and Ferragamo shoes kicked off and lying in the ample floor space in front of them.

The cabin crew fawn around them, proffering plates of canapes, massaging necks and shoulders, and fanning them with laurel branches. And is that a bunch of grapes being lowered into one passenger’s open mouth?

By the time you’ve squeezed yourself into seat 459E, with no one stopping by to offer you even a boiled sweet, you’re feeling a little hard done by, and starting to get a little hot under your St Bernard shirt collar.

As the flight progresses, and the curtain separating first class from the rest of the plane remains closed, you can feel your inner socialist start to emerge, followed soon after by your less evenly tempered inner Marxist revolutionary.

The last straw comes when the flight attendant tells you that, no, you can’t use the loo at the front of the plane, because that’s reserved for the rich, and they wouldn’t want an unclean pauper like you contaminating the place.

Cue a full-on air-rage attack, followed by an emergency landing and you being hauled off the plane as you chant what sounds like a mash-up of We Shall Overcome and The Cranberries' Zombie.

Okay, I’m exaggerating, but a recent study has found that air rage is four times more likely to occur on planes that have first-class sections. Researchers at the University of Toronto and Harvard Business School studied incident reports from a major international airline and found that incidents were more common on flights where passengers were segregated between first class and economy.

And when economy passengers were made to parade through first class the chances of air rage rose even higher. The reason? The in-your-face inequality turns the plane into an airborne battlefield of class warfare.

Segregated seating comes with a variety of descriptions – business class, elite class, economy-plus – but all have a similar effects on passengers.

“The modern airplane is a social microcosm of class-based society,” say the researchers, and “temporary exposure to both physical and situational inequality, induced by the design of environments, can foster antisocial behaviour”.

And it’s not just the peasants in coach acting up: people in first class are also likely to make trouble. It would appear that creating a segregated environment in a confined space is stressful for everybody.

The economy passengers feel as if they are being treated like dirt, and the first-class passengers, “made more aware of their relatively advantaged status”, are intimidated by the envy emanating from the general area behind their goose-down pillows. It’s a struggle between a sense of helplessness and a sense of entitlement.

The researchers are not saying that the presence of a first-class section causes air rage, but it would seem that the overt class consciousness feeds into passengers’ anxietie, and creates an atmosphere in which air rage can more easily erupt. And it’s more often directed at a member of staff than at another passenger.

The report comes at a time when the huge salaries paid at the top tier of business are under scrutiny and when the wealth chasm is growing ever wider between the have-nots and the have-yachts.

Although inequality is increasing in the world, most of the time we don’t want it rubbed in our faces – until we board an international flight. So, instead of tackling inequality, airlines seem hell bent on reinforcing it by favouring rich passengers over their less well-heeled customers.

As long as the seats up front cost north of €2,000, airlines are unlikely to abolish first class, but it has been suggested that they could reduce air-rage incidents by significantly improving conditions at the back of the plane, so that economy passengers don’t feel so strongly that they’re in steerage.

Until the wider problem of inequality is addressed it might be prudent to keep first class in place for now. After all, you don’t want Sir Philip Green to end up beside a BHS retiree whose pension has been sunk into Green’s €125 million yacht.

Some day soon we may all be able to fly together in perfect social harmony. In the meantime I’m travelling on budget airlines.