From the wicker chairs of the 1920s, the evolution of airplane seats has rapidly diverged in two different directions — toward luxurious full-sized beds on first class international flights and the increasingly tiny torture devices in economy. Clearly, what’s happening in the air parallels growing class schisms on the ground, but what makes air travel unique (and often, uniquely rage-inducing) is the juxtaposition of these elements within the same confined space, all set against a backdrop of general travel stress and anxiety.

Designers for Boeing and manufacturers of interior airplane components like seats will tell you that most planes have become safer and more comfortable over time, pointing to the earliest days of random furniture scattered around low-ceilinged spaces and turbulent flights that took many times longer than they do now. But when most contemporary travelers think about how flying experiences have changed, our points of reference are much more recent, recalling the “golden age of air travel” between the 1950s and 1970s.

We can either summon our own memories or view photographs of guests enjoying meals of wine and lobster (with real forks and knives) or swiveling around in wingback chairs to enjoy the performance of a live pianist – all on an economy class ticket. Some planes were even decked out in designs by Alexander Girard and Emilio Pucci, outfitted with murals, live plants and spacious dressing rooms.

Now, for those who must wait until last to board and then march through business class trying not to look directly at all the personal space, cocktails and warm towels awaiting deeper-pocketed passengers, the cattle car endurance challenge of economy can be demoralizing. Going through invasive TSA screening and cramming yourself into increasingly tight seats with your knees pressed into your chest, only to find upon landing that your luggage has been lost, doesn’t exactly promote a cheerful atmosphere. But hey, at least people can no longer smoke cigarettes in the air.

The problem with the 3-5-3 A380 layout, as demonstrated by @AirlineFlyer. #paxex #AIX15 pic.twitter.com/iXkvbKpGM2

— John Walton • @thatjohn.bsky.social (@thatjohn) April 14, 2015

Advances in technology have offered airlines jets with ever lighter and more aerodynamic qualities, reducing fuel consumption and delivering lower operating costs, yet they’re pushed to their absolute limits to pack as many passengers in as they can. The pitch of seats – which is the distance between the front of one seat and the back of the seat in front of it – once measured 34 to 35 inches, but has since shrunk to an average of 30, with some measuring just 28 inches. Meanwhile, seat widths have narrowed to as little as 17 inches across. The FAA has declined to place limits on just how low they can go. Many passengers find that there’s no way to avoid their bodies overlapping with those of their neighbors.

These measurements don’t reflect the realities of human bodies, let alone minimum requirements for comfort when you’re stuck in one position for hours at a time. Airlines are eliminating amenities, raising fees and constantly trying to pack more rows of seating onto the same planes, and some are even considering seat designs that require passengers to lean rather than sit or doing away with seats altogether, creating a whole new class of tickets that offer standing room only. And, as interior space grows more scarce, carry-on baggage compartments and bathrooms are shrinking as well. To get a few extra inches of space, you have to pay for yet another class of ticket, typically referred to as Economy Plus or Economy Comfort, or use a controversial brawl-inciting product like the Knee Defender that keeps the person in front of you from reclining into your lap.

Meanwhile, in first class, airlines are competing to offer the types of amenities typically seen on private jets, like Singapore Airlines’ new A380 suites offering plush full-sized beds. 180-degree lie-flat seats, four-course meals by Michelin chefs served on china, wardrobes, desks and in-flight showers aren’t uncommon, albeit coming at a cost of up to five times as much as an economy ticket. Business class seats enjoy a width of up to 34 inches, with as much as 87 inches of pitch.

The Ticket to Diminishing Expectations

How’d we get here? Some answers to that question are obvious. Airlines, like most businesses in our current economic system, have a primary goal of pushing profits as high as they can. And even in a time of record profits, thanks in part to cheap fuel, they’re working to cut costs. With most planes flying at full capacity, airlines simply don’t have to work very hard to buy the loyalty of passengers who want to pay as little as possible to travel. Plus, back in the days of luxurious amenities in so-called economy class, flights were priced high enough that only certain strata of society could afford them at all. President Carter’s 1978 Airline Deregulation Act helped democratize air travel, making it more accessible than ever, and today, fares are at historic lows – but clearly, we pay for it in other ways.

We live in a world that’s crammed full of people and more traversable than ever, so the question is, how low can the base level standard of service go? Even as air travel grows more affordable, our roads and bridges are crumbling and high speed rail projects never manage to materialize, giving us few alternatives. It’s also worth remembering that even on the cheapest tickets, air travel is still a considerable expense for many people in the United States, where almost a third of the population lives at or near the poverty line.

Judging by airport design alone, the future of air travel looks high tech and glitzy. But if air travel trends continue along their current trajectories, it’ll be interesting to see just how much more segregated the experience becomes for travelers of varying classes. With the middle class shrinking, the number of people who can pay thousands of extra dollars to sit in the front of the plane will likely remain as small and exclusive as ever, leading everyone else to wonder whether getting a bargain requires giving up even the most minimal comforts. Will the rear ends of planes someday look like the notoriously crammed subways of Tokyo?

With our expectations of air travel experiences diminishing, perhaps renewed pushes for better transportation on the ground will emerge – which might be for the best, anyway, given the massive effect all those flights have on the climate.

Pretend like you’re on a journey to a galaxy far, far away while aboard a real Star Wars-themed aircraft painted to look like R2-D2 on a Japan-based ANA Airways flight. The R2-D2 Dreamliner aircraft is an officially Star Wars-branded 787-9, the logo writ large across the body of the plane, and is set to take flight for the first time in September 2015.

ANA chose R2-D2 not just because the shape happens to be convenient for the nose of a plane, but because the character is “not your typical droid,” they explain. “No matter the challenge, the highly loyal R2-D2 never fails to complete his mission and surprise us with his clever solutions.”

Never mind that as passengers on an international flight, most of us would prefer that clever solutions never have to come into play in the first place. The plane’s design is a welcome change from the usual airline logos, and it’ll be fun for unsuspecting onlookers to spot it from the ground.

The plane is a promotional tie-in for the upcoming film Star Wars: The Force Awakens, due to hit theaters on December 18th.

If you think you can smuggle a sword cleverly concealed inside a cane, a lipstick that’s actually a taser, pigeons wrapped in newspaper or nylon bags full of snakes onto an airplane, think again. The Transportation Security Administration has truly seen and confiscated it all, as documented on both their blog and their Instagram. Here are 13 of the weirdest and most disturbing items that the TSA has discovered during the security screening process.

Snakes on a Plane

TSA screeners monitoring a body scanner at the Miami International Airport in 2011 were puzzled by what looked like bulbous growths attached to a man’s legs. Pulling him aside, they discovered that the man’s pants were full of snakes and tortoises wrapped in nylon bags. Had they not caught him, he would have walked onto the plane with seven snakes and three tortoises, likely bound for the illegal pet trade.

A Chastity Belt

Says the TSA of this unusual discovery, “And while it isn’t prohibited, a passenger wearing a chastity belt alarmed the body scanner at one of our checkpoints. I’m sure you can imagine where an undergarment such as this might be a problem at a security checkpoint. Especially if there is no key.”

Daggers Disguised as Hairbrushes & Combs

Do some quick internet browsing and you can find knives and other weapons disguised as all sorts of clever things. That doesn’t mean you should try to take them on a flight. Screeners don’t take it lightly when they find hairbrushes, combs and other everyday items concealing potentially deadly daggers.

Mickey Mouse Full of Guns

Would it ever occur to you that a stuffed Mickey Mouse clutched in someone’s arms was filled with firearms? Maybe that depends on who’s holding it. Mickey is just one of many stuffed animals that have been used to smuggle guns and ammunition at the airport.

A Bag of Eels & A Whole Lot of Fish

Referring to the incident as a “nomadic aquarium for people on the go,” the TSA pulled aside a passenger who was attempting to transport 163 tropical fish, 12 ‘red sliders,’ 22 invertebrates, 24 live coral species, 8 pieces of Scleactinina with mushroom polyps and 8 pieces of soft coral from Miami to Maracaibo. “We’re not in the business of looking for marine life, but you can probably imagine how odd this looked on our monitor.”

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Taken By The Tsa 13 Strange Items Confiscated At Airports

With their inefficient terminals and bloated footprints, today’s airports are typically ill-equipped to adapt to sharp increases in demand, scarce land availability or new flight technologies. These 13 futuristic airport designs address current and upcoming air travel challenges, from beautiful expansions currently under construction to fantastical concepts that accommodate vertical lift-off.

Airport Skyscraper

Beijing is in dire need of new airports, but also doesn’t have a lot of acreage to spare. This concept for the 2012 eVolo Skyscraper Competition solves both problems with ‘airport skyscrapers’ shaped like giant mushrooms. Not only does this free up the space below, it also effectively reduces the length of the runways since wind speed is higher 450 meters in the air than it is at sea level.

Floating Airport for London with Underwater Tunnels

Using the surface of rivers and the sea also frees up precious land, as illustrated in this futuristic airport design by architecture firm Gensler. Envisioned for the Thames River, the London Britannia consists of a series of rounded pods connected to four floating runways anchored to the sea floor. Underground tunnels would connect passengers to the city and to European rail networks.

Shenzen Airport Mimics a Manta Ray

Taking inspiration from both the natural form of a manta ray and the more obvious shape of an airplane, the Shenzen airport extension in China is covered in thousands of hexagonal skylights across a steel and glass canopy, creating a honeycomb pattern within the undulating all-white interior.

Malpensa Airport Proposal

A modular geometric roof consisting of brushed metal in three golden shades makes a big impact on the Malpensa Airport, creating a covered area that serves as an exhibition space and pedestrian walkway between the Expess Train Station and Terminal 1 of the Milan Airport.

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The Future Takes Flight 13 Forward Thinking Airport Ideas

The remains of large concrete arrows can be found in patches of dirt and grass across the United States from New York to San Francisco. Many locals have wondered what they’re for, seemingly pointing nowhere at all and often located in fairly remote places. They were installed in the 1920s, each accompanied by a fifty-foot tower and a tiny hut, and became obsolete within a decade.

So what were they for? Getting mail delivered in the time period just after the birth of the airplane, but before the wide use of radar and radio communications. The arrows helped guide airmail pilots at night, when flights would otherwise be grounded due to inability to properly navigate. The ability to deliver mail by plane represented a huge step in the evolution of U.S. mail delivery, vastly speeding up a system that had previously relied on stagecoach lines.

The system used fifty-foot beacon towers with rotating lights placed on top of concrete foundations shaped like arrows, usually between 50-70 feet in length. A small hut offered a place to stay for the people who maintained the generators and lights. The beacons were only visible from a distance of about 10 miles.

By the end of the first year of the program, the airmail service had 18 terminal airfields and more than 500 beacon lights in operation along the main mail delivery route, and continued to expand throughout the 1920s. But by 1933, new technology and the high cost of operation during the depression shut the program down. The towers were disassembled for their steel during World War II. A few have been preserved, like the one pictured above at the Western New Mexico Aviation Heritage Museum.

While many of the arrows have since been lost to development, those further afield still offer a (sometimes mystifying) glimpse of the past. The blog Sometimes Interesting has compiled a list with map links to arrows that still remain in New Mexico, Wyoming, Idaho, Nevada and other states.