Plane Privilege

I have always loved flying. From the first time I got in an aeroplane age 9 to fly to Majorca, I've loved it. I find take off thrilling: the momentary sense of falling when the plane first leaves the ground, everything rapidly shrinking to model then map scale, the clouds flicking past, the guaranteed blinding sunshine. I love it. I never ever get tired of looking out of aeroplane windows (unless it's nighttime and cloudy below). It is a massive privilege that no human ever experienced until about 110 years ago and, if we carry on the way we're going, no human will be able to experience in 110 years time.
In the last 18 months I have flown over 130,000 miles for work and that is not a brag, I am slightly ashamed of that fact. I'm going to spend the rest of my life working off my carbon footprint. Most of the time when I fly back home, my flight is the first to land in Heathrow and I always think about my friends who endlessly tweet about plane noise from Heathrow early in the morning. Sorry guys.
Such a ridiculous amount of flying inevitably brings with it 'rewards': I have fairly rapidly climbed through the ranks of the frequent flyer programme of a well known airline and have recently reached 'the top' (although people who care about these things assure me that there is a special club for people who presumably rarely actually ever get off a plane) only to discover that the first class lounge seems designed solely to hide all the total pricks who think that flying a lot makes them automatically superior to everyone else, so that you good people don't have to put up with them striding around and bellowing into their phones anywhere else in the airport. In my limited experience of them, first class lounges are barely any nicer than their business class counterparts. They always have champagne, but often less choice of other things. What pervades in all that I have encountered is the overwhelming sense of entitlement emanating from their occupants. There is a feeling that  being afforded the massive privilege of being able to travel vast distances comfortably and quickly, whilst being plied with free booze and food in some way renders them übermensch. Once you begin to believe this fallacy, there is no end to the shitty ways you think it is acceptable to behave. I have seen a man sit in his aeroplane seat and watch whilst a member of cabin crew picked his work up from the floor and put it away in the overhead locker. He did not thank her. He was not busy doing anything else, he was simply sitting there watching, being fat and self-important. No one in business class ever seems to look out of the window. No one ever seems to gaze down at the world in wonder. I'm sure there are others, but usually it feels like it's just me who stares out of the top deck of an A380 and wonders how the hell it's going to get off the ground.
This a shame, but I guess it is the shame of all privilege: that those party to it will rarely take the time to appreciate it. They are either too accustomed to it to understand that it is a privilege or too busy worrying if someone else has more. That is most notably the case when you are able to fly in comfort, but to some extent all flying is a privilege that will always be afforded to only a minority of humanity past, present and future. Maybe remember that next time you get the opportunity to gaze down on your world from 30,000 feet.