It's about time the folks in economy class got some lovin'. For years we've seen the likes of Virgin Atlantic, Emirates Air, and Singapore Airlines pamper their first-class passengers (Virgin calls tham "Upper Class," the snobs) with obscenely luxurious seats that stretch out to full length beds, huge television screens everywhere, fluffy slippers, and smokin' hot flight attendants.

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I don't know about you, but when airline pilots organize themselves enough to protest their employer's overall poor performance—not, I'd like to point out, merely their crappy pay—that gets my attention. That's precisely what hundreds of American Airlines pilots intend to do tomorrow in nine cities around the country. They'll be demonstrating at major airports to "encourage passengers to help AA employees get management's attention" to fix problems relating to performance and customer service. Specifically, American has the worst on-time performance among network carriers. The pilots are also, naturally, not particularly amused about the nose-gear-wiring fiasco that grounded hundreds of aircraft and caused countless traveler delays last week.

European travelers may soon have a chance to chat away on their own phones while in flight. For the new system to work, planes would be outfitted with small mobile base stations known as pico cells. The cells would be switched off during take-off, and turned on once the planes reach a given altitude, which would be a minimum of 3,000 meters. Phone signals would be routed to the mobile base stations, which would in turn dispatch signals to ground-based networks through a satellite link.

Everyone can guess the worst way to load passengers on to a plane is to do it front to back. People would have to wait at every row or squeeze awkwardly past. It would stand to reason, then, that the way airlines usually do it—back to front—would be the best way. But according to Fermilab physicist Jason Steffen, that's not the case. As it turns out, it's far from the best: it's the second worst.

Last summer, more than 1,000 environmentalists in the U.K. staged a weeklong protest in a "Climate Camp" at Heathrow Airport, where about 70 people were arrested. Their immediate purpose was to block a planned expansion of Heathrow, but the protests highlighted a growing complaint in Europe—that the ride to global-warming catastrophe is being fueled not only by coal-fired power plants and SUVs, but also by the ever-rising number of commercial jets. Now governments are starting to listen.

Nearly five years after September 11, the airline industry is finally adopting new in-flight technologies to keep planes safe from terrorists. With $110 million in grant money from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Aviation Administration is currently in the process of certifying two antimissile systems designed for commercial airliners. The technology uses infrared sensors to detect and track incoming missiles, then fires a laser beam to jam a heat-seeking missile´s infrared guidance system.