It’s a walk of shame, that slow tramp through the upper-class cabin, clutching your boarding pass for 43B. Eight hours of arm-rest wars lie ahead, but with your earplugs and neck-pillow you’re mentally brace-brace-braced. Then you see them, reclining on cream leather thrones; flute of fizz, laptop out, just a magic button away from bedtime. You will endure; they will enjoy.
So why are they always scowling, these executives handing jackets for the stewardess to hang, the parents who’ve booked a £3k flatbed seat for each tiny Petit Bateau-clad child? Why aren’t they beaming: can’t they at least manage a rueful, “unlucky mate” smile as we pass? Instead they glare at us trudging peasants over their copies of Forbes, pick at their Japanese crackers, ache for when we’re airborne, the dividing curtain is whipped shut and they can activate the walls of their pods.
It is rare to have a face-off with those who have much more or less than we do. And a fascinating academic study shows how unsettling we find it. Examining several million flights of an unnamed international airline, Katherine DeCelles, a University of Toronto professor, and Michael Norton of Harvard Business School, discovered air rage was more common when — because airport gates didn’t support separate entrances — passengers had to board though the same door.
In economy, outbursts more than doubled, but in upper class an incident was 12 times as likely. The peasant-class revolt is easier to understand. You’re excited about your holiday until you see, privilege being relative not absolute, how much better it could be. A modern aircraft is a flying microcosm of society. As in life, we are hurtling towards the same final destination, but along the way some have more space, nicer food, even a better use of their time. How galling it is to be held back at the exit until the club class folk have legged it to the front of the passport control queue.
Moreover, the airline is keen to stratify your experience. A pilot friend reports that American Airlines is an industry joke for how horribly it treats passengers in coach and I’ve witnessed its staff berate a mother for fumbling with a baby’s seatbelt. Kindness is crudely monetised: if you want to be treated as fully human, pay more. And onboard inequality is getting worse: economy passengers are squeezed into tinier spaces to make room for the huge, gaudy first-class “apartments” of Etihad or China Eastern’s double beds, mile-high club membership guaranteed.
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No wonder then, back in economy, your Zen mindset might snap when the obese man behind levers himself up by grabbing the back of your headrest for the tenth time. Few of us think: I’m glad those guys up front are willing to pay the price of a new car to fly with Bose headphones because it makes my budget ticket cheaper, any more than we’re grateful to the rich for paying more tax.
According to DeCelles and Norton, lower-class rage is characterised by emotional outbursts expressing a “loss of control”. In club, it is “belligerent” behaviour. Coming across those less fortunate doesn’t make the rich feel grateful, rather it underlines their entitlement. I paid a stack more than these plebs so why is my chablis not optimally chilled, why can’t I play Fruit Ninja on my iPad during the safety drill, don’t you know who I am?
“Kindness is monetised. To be treated as fully human, you pay more
Extreme inequality is only sustainable if the two sides never meet. Would Sir Philip Green be so comfortable defending his actions at BHS if he had to brush up against the pensioners left impoverished? No chance of that in his private plane, or on the bow of his third super-yacht. As wealth differentials have increased, now half the world’s riches is owned by just 62 billionaires — down from 80 last year — there has been a retreat from the public sphere. In London, the rich build their bubbles. Private schools or medicine, and taking cars not Tubes are nothing new. But now basements are dug out for cinemas, yoga studios and swimming pools. Enjoy the city? Why? The ultimate luxury is never encountering a person poorer than yourself, who isn’t staff.
Once London’s glory was that, unlike class-apartheid Manhattan, it was a messy mix. You couldn’t pretend the poor didn’t exist: Madonna once moaned that her Mayfair mansion was too near a council block. Now inner-city public housing is sold off. Councils try to insist on “pepper-potting” the affordable flats — which must be included by law — among the luxury gaffs but developers always shove the cheap apartments in one block or create separate entrances: “poor doors” in side streets away from the marble lobbies for the City types. No doubt few would mind meeting old cockney ladies or mums with pushchairs in the lift, but developers know it could bring down the price.
Yet nowhere is duller than a place where the rich are alone with their money. Monaco, Knightsbridge, Nice, Dubai, the VIP rooms of exclusive clubs, $1,000-a-plate dinners, nightclubs where they bring out Swarovski-crystal crusted magnums of champagne: swank in lieu of fun. In five-star hotels you rarely hear hoots of laughter, just see the sulky and insecure looking fearful that someone is having a better time.
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I’ve only flown first class once (I wasn’t paying). Caviar, Krug, stewardesses who treat you like a sultan. It struck me in my window berth, yards from another passenger, that in an emergency I’d hate to be here. In economy you could cling to a stranger, here you couldn’t reach a hand to hold. First class, for all its benefits, would be a lonely place to die.