Before discount airlines and cheap fares, transit lounges would be full of suits, male and female, each with laptop or briefcase.

There was a higher-than-average presence of the Financial Review and the Australian newspapers folded open to the pages important to important people.

Flying was the customary commute to the “other office” or to clients.

Conversations were between colleagues from the same company or department. Polite greetings were the depth of relationship with others.

It was civilised, business-like.

Enter the discount airlines.

The mood, indeed, the landscape changed. The transit lounge now looks like a teenager’s bedroom and, for some curled up in a chair, it is exactly that while they wait for their flight.

Earphones are everywhere, so someone in the group has to stay on watch to hear when a flight is called.

Carry-on luggage is a bloated sports bags filled with a pillow, an emergency coat and a travel menu of chocolate or muesli bars and bottled water.

Teenagers travel in tribes, frequently for school excursions.

In holiday season, airlines are populated by families with young children whose ears are sensitive to low cabin pressure and the constant drone of turbo jet. The infants travel with what must seem like a swarm of wasps in their head.

The business traveller is increasingly forced onto these flights as larger aircraft replace small, and with larger crowds unfamiliar with the protocols of sharing such a confined space and limited supply of oxygen.

Don’t open that laptop unless you want it irrigated with Pepsi Max or garnished with potato chip crumbs.

Read a broadsheet newspaper? Not even in the toilet.

This picture of torment is painted so those on terra firma can understand why there is terror in the skies; why there is attitude at altitude.

And there is.

In past weeks two incidents underline the symptoms if not the specifics of the new class war in the sky.