Back from Los Angeles to Abu Dhabi today, which is by no means a puddle jump, and I am reminded of how air travel has changed, for the worse, in my lifetime.

Three decades ago (and even two decades ago on some airlines), to hear someone talk about a long plane ride was to conjure images of restful stretches in wide seats, seen to by cheerful flight attendants who served you chicken Kiev (this really happened to me, in my youth) and the quiet whoosh and peaceful, world-disconnect of a big plane at 35,000 feet.

Ah, the thrum of the white noise of humming jet engines is making me sleepy. (Or is it the little buzz from the tiny bottles of wine they once gave out, at no extra charge, with dinner?)

Now, plane travel is an ordeal. A form of torture. A grueling test of body and soul to be survived and, if lucky, forgotten.  Unless you’re chasing 50 pounds of missing luggage.

We needed 29 hours, door to door, from Abu Dhabi to Los Angeles. Coming back?

It took “only” 24 hours. Door to door. And might have been less, had not we lost an hour standing in front of the “lost luggage” counter at the Abu Dhabi airport. We flew American on the first leg here, from LAX to Chicago, and Etihad (Abu Dhabi’s carrier) from Chicago to here, and one of our two bags didn’t make the trip with us. And nothing puts an unpleasant punctuation mark on a trip like lost luggage.

I hold out hope that it still might turn up. I mean, it’s a big bag, with lots of stuff in it (and nearly all of the gifts we had bought), and my name is on the bag, and Etihad now has the bag-tag number, and we can tell them that “Juliette” handled check-in in Los Angeles, and I know the tag was on the bag because TSA won’t take bags without tags on them, right? And we handed them to the TSA guy at the big giant X-ray machine at the end of the American counter, and he said, “OK, you’re good to go.”

Actually, what is preying on me more than the idea that hundreds-of-dollars worth of “stuff” might never show up … is the sheer torment that a halfway-round-the-world ride in an airplane now represents. The event is like a scar that forms and stays with you for days and can even make you vow to “not do anything like this again” — at least until you forget.

Ten reasons why air travel sucks like it never sucked before.

1. Crowds. Airlines have mastered the “art” of planting a butt in every seat on every plane. How do they do it? How do they sell that last middle-of-the-row seat for every flight? What it means is that the hope of any room to stretch out, which was a realistic one a generation ago, is a sucker’s bet, now. If you fly with an empty seat next to you, now, you have won the lottery.

2. The widening of the flying public. OK, yes, I’m an air-travel snob. I don’t have the money or breeding of a snob, but I was a frequent flier back when it wasn’t torment, and the explosion of the flying population has made things infinitely worse. How can I put this kindly … about half of the people in the air weren’t in the air a generation ago and probably shouldn’t be even now. On the whole, these new air travelers would have been riding a bus 30 years ago, and they bring with them all the gentility, civility and attention to hygiene that one associates with a Greyhound bus depot.

Also, the explosion in the number of mewling, undisciplined kids and infants on planes absolutely has led to a worse experience. The plane from Chicago was practically an endless chorus of screaming toddlers. And I had on headphones. Turned up high.

3. High-altitude famine. Again, talking about a long lost Golden Age here, but any flight of three hours or more, back in the day, would mean a meal was served. Not peanuts. A meal. At no extra charge. People have complained about airplane food forever, but I never had chicken Kiev until it was served on a plane. Those little meals were pretty good, especially compared to what is available now. Which often is nothing.

4. The end of all perks. What do air carriers give you, without extra charge, these days? You can check a few smallish bags. That’s free, generally. Though some airlines charge even for that. A flight of an hour or more will get you a free cup of soda or juice. Usually. And that’s it. Not even peanuts. Which has led to the pathetic practice of people getting on a plane as if they were mounting a 10-day assault on Everest. Have to carry your own food, your own blankets, pillows, water. Almost need to buy a second seat for a Sherpa so that you don’t perish in the attempt to fly.

5. Security. Probably mentioning this one too late, but the hoops we now jump through before we get on a plane are invasive and time-consuming. For the privilege of boarding a plane, we now take off our shoes and belts and put our hands in the air (like cornered criminals) in front of an X-ray machine while responding to ever-changing orders barked at us by more-than-a-little threatening and unpleasant and power-mad TSA agents. Again, talking about the Golden Age, but we used to walk directly to the gate (with bottles of water, thank you) — and get on the plane, once someone checked to see if we actually had tickets. Now, an actual printed ticket is about the only thing that is not examined or probed.

There was a time, I tell you, kids, when you could walk into an airport 15 minutes before takeoff and you would make that plane. This never happens anymore. Never. Before the American flight today, the ticket agent lady (Juliette) told us that we had “five minutes” to check our bags. This was more than an hour before boarding time.

Seriously, if someone said the only security these days was walking through a metal detector, so that no one could carry a gun on board … I would sign a waiver pledging not to sue the airline if some maniac somehow crashed the plane. One idiot with a bad shoe bomb now has us walking around barefoot in the airport. The terrorists have won this battle for personal dignity.

6. Horrible planes. They seem to crash less often. There’s that. But many modern planes are turned into instruments of torture in the hands of airlines. Etihad, for example, configured the Boeing 777 we flew from Chicago to Abu Dhabi into a 3-4-3 configuration. We each had 17 inches, left to right, and hardly any more front to back. When the woman in front of me chose to recline, the seat in front of me was about six inches from my nose. I had to recline just so I could see my little TV screen. In a wide-body plane, no more than nine seats should be in any row.

7. The proliferation of horrible planes. Airlines are so worried about fuel costs now that they buy only the “efficient” mid-size planes and fly them places they never went, before. Again in the Golden Age, any coast-to-coast flight in the U.S. would be on a wide-body plane, which means an ability to get up and move around. Now, it’s routinely 757s flying from New York to Los Angeles, a seat with a 3-3 seating configuration which becomes uncomfortable even while taxiing.

8. Overhead luggage. Because people don’t want to pay to check bags, and also don’t want to part with them because they 1) may lose time waiting for them at baggage claim or 2) may never see them again at all, everyone is trying to carry the contents of entire closets onto planes. That leads to Overhead Luggage Wars on nearly every plane, as passengers ruthlessly try to stuff their suitcase and backpacks and color TVs into the limited space before it all disappears.

9. The breakdown of all discipline at the gate. How hard is this, really? You board by rows. We used to do it all the time. They call 10 rows, everyone with those boarding passes gets up, no one else can board. Only when all those people are on the jetway would the next group be called. Now? A free-for-all. A mini-riot. Everyone heads for the gate, and in most countries it turns into a mob scene, with pushing and shoving. It is chaos, and this is the fault of the airlines because fliers cannot depend on boarding discipline, as they could once upon a time, when “rows 20-29 are now boarding” meant that no one else was getting on the plane. Yesterday? Two mob scenes, and a call for rows 45-55 actually meant the whole damn plane was boarding. This is awful and dehumanizing.

10.  The end of civility between passenger and crew. It’s all threats and warnings, now. I guess that’s how it has to be, when “security” is Job 1 and “charging special for perks” is Job 2. Now it’s Us Against Them, and it works both ways. We have the rude flight attendants and ticket agents. And they hate us, crude and stupid as we are, even more than we hate them.

So, I made it back. But not until I lost a day in misery, the once-glam idea of traveling 10,000 miles turned into an ordeal that included sleep deprivation, unpleasant odors, a tiny cube of personal space easily invaded, and the tyranny of airplane as Greyhound. It wasn’t always this bad. Like so many other things, I’m sorry younger generations have known only the crappy part of this industry.

The only solutions now? Travel first class, or at least business class. Too bad most of us will never be able to afford it.