The Great Divide is a series about inequality.

Photo

The choice of “snacks” on some recent flights I’ve taken include blue potato chips, a cranberry-almond bar, a packet of trail mix and — a selection I haven’t been offered before — popcorn. But it makes sense: the cabin already feels like a movie theater at the end of a showing, even though we still have an hour to go. The floor is strewn with candy-bar wrappers and broken headsets, crumpled napkins and cracked plastic glasses. There’s so little legroom that I have to push my knees against the seat in front of me as if I’m doing crunches. Welcome to economy.

During an intercontinental flight, I notice that “on the other side of the curtain” — as the first-class and business cabins are referred to — dinners are being served on white linen tablecloths, with actual bone china. Everyone’s got their “amenities kit” — one of those little nylon bags containing slippers, an eyeshade and a toothbrush. And legroom? Tons. While our seat width contracts — on some airlines by nearly eight inches in recent years — the space up front continues to expand: Emirates Airlines now offers, as part of its “first-class private suite,” a private room with minibar, wide-screen TV and “lie-flat bed.”

This stark class division should come as no surprise: what’s happening in the clouds mirrors what’s happening on the ground. Statusization — to coin a useful term — is ubiquitous, no matter what your altitude. While you’re in your hospital bed spooning up red Jell-O, a patient in a private suite is enjoying strawberries and cream. On your way to a Chase A.T.M., you notice a silver plaque declaring the existence within of Private Client Services. This man has a box seat at a Yankees game; that man has a skybox. And the skybox isn’t the limit: high overhead, the 1 percent fly first class; the .1 percent fly Netjets; the .01 fly their own planes. Why should it be any different up above from down below?

The hardships of economy don’t seem to deter us from air travel. There were close to a billion domestic passenger trips last year.

But moving up feels harder than it used to — or it does from where I sit (27F). We’re all going everywhere and nowhere at the same time. In his new book, “The Great Degeneration,” the historian Niall Ferguson confirms my intuition. His argument is that we’ve seen a precipitous decline in social mobility over the last 30 years: “Once the United States was famed as a land of opportunity, where a family could leap from ‘rags to riches’ in a generation.” Now it can’t even leap from economy to business. You can make some progress in small ways: the gold club members get to board before the silver club members. The passenger who earns a certain number of miles is rewarded with a complimentary drink. But those in the back of the plane can fight all they want over their status. They’re still not getting any more legroom.

On a Web site called Flyertalk, I learned from a blogger just how close we are to class warfare in the sky. Disgusted by the grubby conditions on his flight, this Robespierre of the unfriendly skies invokes the French Revolution and warns: If you annoy “the salt of the earth enough, the rank and file and what have you, sometimes you wind up beheaded.” Let them eat Pringles.

I try to have a more positive attitude. It’s good for my posture to sit up straight, and it makes me feel as if I’m meditating. Besides, I’m lucky I get to go anywhere, never mind where I sit: the day will come, once we’ve depleted the earth’s resources, when the “road warrior” racking up millions of miles will seem as archaic a figure as the door-to-door salesman.

But as the litter piles up beneath my seat, it occurs to me that flying has become like driving — only instead of collapsing bridges and potholed roads, the hazards a traveler in economy faces are crippling back pain and plastic-wrapped ham sandwiches tossed on a tray by hassled flight attendants. It’s just another infrastructure in collapse.

AH, the old days … But it’s true: there was a time when air travel — for everyone, regardless of class station — was synonymous with luxury. Bruce Handy captured the way things were in a nostalgic Vanity Fair essay about stewardesses (“stews”): “Their ‘look’ was as polished as the marble in a corporate lobby,” writes Mr. Handy. They wore lipstick and false eyelashes, white gloves and crisply folded hats. And they were young: the mandatory retirement age was 32. Flying in that long-vanished era, when Kennedy was Idlewild and the MetLife Building atop Grand Central was the Pan Am Building, felt special. I remember being presented with plastic wings on my first flight to Nassau, Bahamas, when I was 13. I was like that kid in “Catch Me if You Can” who comes up to Leonardo DiCaprio, looking spiffy in his captain’s uniform with gold stripes on the sleeve, and asks for his autograph: “Are you a real live pilot?”

The movie is set in the mid-’60s, the end of a high moment in American life, at least for the middle class. It was a time when public schools could still be counted on to provide a decent education; when it was possible for most families to live on one income — almost always Dad’s — buy a house in the suburbs and go on vacation twice a year. (We took the Super Chief from Chicago to California every winter, the porters swaying through the corridors with their dinner gongs as they summoned us to the dining room with the snowy dining cloths and the rose in a fluted vase.) The country was prosperous; if you weren’t rich, you felt rich.

Anyway, it didn’t matter. There was no caste system. You could get on a plane and be shown your seat in coach without having to mill around at the gate waiting for your “group” to be called. You weren’t a “member” of Premier, Business, Gold Circle, Executive Platinum or some other designation that indicated how often you flew and how much you put on your credit card. You were just a passenger, on your way to spend a few days with the grandparents or take the kids to Disneyland.

Photo

But as class distinctions become ever more finely calibrated, the competition to move up — or keep from moving down — intensifies. Vance Packard, in his 1959 classic “The Status Seekers,” called attention to a phenomenon in the advertising business known as the “upgrading urge.” The term was then used to describe the impulse to buy more and more expensive products; today it could be applied — in the literal sense — to the obsessive collection of “miles.”

Walter Kirn, in “Up in the Air,” his 2001 comic novel about flying, identifies a place called Airworld: “a nation within a nation, with its own architecture, mood, and even its own currency — the token economy of airline bonus miles.” In Airworld — and in the real world — frequent-flier miles enable you not only to upgrade but also to get deals on hotels and car rentals. “The more you fly, the sooner you’ll achieve Premier Status,” boasts United. I knew there was some reason I wanted to see Kansas City before I died.

For the airlines, this kind of statusization is a key marketing component. In May, in an effort to compete with Netjets and private jets, American unveiled a new premier service, an elite category for those who can afford to pay approximately $18,000 for a round-trip ticket to London.

Curious about what they could possibly offer that wasn’t available in regular first, I arranged to go out to Kennedy Airport for a tour. A nice American employee introduced me to four other employees, and I set off with my scrum of minders.

We began at the Flagship check-in, a private entrance with a velvet rope — “our entrance for movie stars to avoid the paparazzi,” it was explained to me. Luggage is transported to a hidden door by means of a brass hotel baggage cart. While waiting for your ticket to be processed, you can read quotes in silver letters embossed on the wall from Henry Miller, Ian Frazier and Diane Arbus: “My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been.”

Statusization is ubiquitous, no matter what your altitude.

There’s a Flagship Lounge — complete with its own chef, marble bathrooms with showers and Eames chairs for napping. And two conference rooms with flat-screen TVs. The eight seats in the plane’s premier section are so elaborately equipped that it looks as if it would take half the flight just to figure out how everything works. Let’s see, where’s the lever for this swivel chair? Where do you plug in the Bose headset?

In its efforts to provide “high-value customers” with a “private, intimate, exclusive” experience, the airline hands out all kinds of cool stuff, from pajamas and a duvet to “branded dermatologic products.” The “in-flight wine tasting” offers five vintage labels. And you’re always plugged in: behind each seat is a wall of electronic outlets to recharge one’s gadgets, in order to ensure “life uninterrupted.” (What a nightmare.)

At the end of my tour, I walked down the aisle past business (less gadgetry, but still a lot), past economy plus (more legroom), and to the vast acreage of economy, row upon row of empty seats that, in a few hours, would be filled with squalling babies, muscled guys in Bubba Gump T-shirts, girls in flamingo-pink tank tops, obese armrest hoggers, divorce lawyers jabbering on their cellphones before takeoff, women in spectacles reading “Wolf Hall,” Hasids, Pakistanis, Japanese — the melting pot of American coach.

At least we got out of steerage. Or did we?

James Atlas is a contributing opinion writer who is at work on a book about biography.