Paying for Airline Food?

Airlines are on the right track testing whether customers will pay for in-flight food.

Delta is the latest to try this concept, following America West and Northwest. The airlines should have done this long ago. Long gone are the days when air travel was a luxury, and passengers dressed in their Sunday best. Airplanes are flying buses. But they do make much longer trips, so some concession to the traveling public's collective growling stomach is necessary. One hopes they can turn a profit off their overpriced "Mrs. Fields cookies, Entenmann's cinnamon rolls and Pizzeria Uno sandwiches" and funnel the money into smoothing out their fare structures into something like Southwest's excellent $299 maximum one-way fare.

There's a drawback, though, to eliminating or sharply cutting back full meals on airlines: Less material for the hilarious AirlineMeals.net, global repository of photographic proof that airline meals stink.