propriety - noun - condition of being right (morally) or fitting (Google).
I love to fly, or at least, I used to. I started being a passenger on commercial jet planes when I was about five. Believe it or not, I still remember portions of my initial, pseudo-Wright-brothers' entry into the skies as–like theirs–it was a tad traumatic. My family (my mother, father, sister, and I) were on a Pan Am Boeing 707 bound from New York's Idlewild (now JFK) to Bermuda. Being that we were a few thousand feet up from the Bermuda Triangle, we hit unexpected turbulence, which sent me searching for the "puke bag" located in the pocket of the seat in front of me. Not pretty. But fortunately, that's not all I recall about that flight. There were also a few positive attributes: models called "stewardesses" who knew the meaning of "customer service," meals that looked like TV dinners served with actual stainless steel utensils that my mother would pocket along with the plastic salt-and-pepper shakers, multiple magazines to read (not that I could, but there were always the photographs at which to gaze), blankets and pillows to get lost in after reclining what seemed like twelve inches back in the seat. There were no rollers shoved into overhead compartments, only hand-carried luggage stored below, and a lot more space between the rows–all for no extra charge (not that I was paying the fare anyway). In short, flying commercially in the early 1960s was a kind of free-floating-above-the-clouds heaven, perhaps reserved for those who could afford it.
Fast forward nearly sixty years. I still fly, but the experience isn't quite the same, thanks in part to People Express, a no-frills airline that sprang up in the 1980s that set the pace for all airlines today. Okay, granted, taking to the "friendly" skies is a lot less expensive today, yet the adage, "You only get what you pay for" pretty much says it all. Flying is trying, sort of like being stuffed in a crowded public school bus winging its way through the troposphere. Even beneath that image is the red eye, that last flight that departs after midnight and gets you to your destination at wee hours of the morning when you'd think the airport would be empty, but it's still packed with even more travelers who want to save a few more bucks by taking the first available planes out. Yikes!
If you can manage to sleep on a red eye, you have a rare talent that I envy. A week ago when I was forced to hightail it to Denver to take the red eye to Newark because I didn't want to pay the 1K roundtrip to hop on a more convenient nonstop from Bozeman to Newark at a decent hour (whew), I observed the body language of the passengers who were dozing, and it wasn't a pretty sight. In fact, if animals were forced to sleep in the same position, the Humane Society would be spending time in court with the airline industry. Since the seats no longer recline any more than an inch back in economy, adults of all shapes and sizes were and are forced to remain vertical, leaning forwards to press their heads against the hard plastic of the area above the tray tables, a pose far from comfortable or even proper.
Obviously, I could go on, but I think you already know the despicable fine points. In short, life in a capitalistic society like ours is not about propriety or anything close to comfort. It's all about profit. Sadly, the airlines are only thinking about how many bodies they can squeeze into each fuselage to generate the billions, not about how they can make the bodies feel like human beings, like the last bunch in the air used to. I can't help but feel that there has got to be a better, still profitable, yet decent way of delivering to the aloft public. Stepping back to the "good ole days" somehow in order to move forward might be a viable solution.
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