One of the few advantages for the masses travelling through Sydney airport is not having to wait for private jets. If there's competition to take off or land, commercial flights go first. It's a bus lane in the sky. While the rich luxuriate in their lounges, breeze past the boarding queue and get their bags delivered first, at least whole planes of tired travellers don't have to yield to a billionaire's Gulfstream.

Yet under changes recommended to the federal government, private jets will get the same landing and take-off priority as the commercial flights the rest of us endure. (Planes carrying heads of state and the Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, will still get special dibs.)

In 2014, Sydney Airport received 42 per cent of its revenue from aeronautical services, and three-quarters of that was from international passengers. Credit:Phil Carrick

This will add to the many irritations at Sydney airport: shameless parking fees, being forced to walk through a massive bottle store to get to your flight overseas, the indignity of standing in a long check-in queue while people with a business-class ticket are seen without delay. Aside from real estate, the entrenchment of the modern class system is most obvious at the airport.

The most galling airport atrocities of the lot are those that favour the rich over the masses and are endorsed by the government that supposedly serves us all.