The first class of the future comes with restaurant, casino, and bed

As economy flights get more wretched, John Carlin reveals premium passengers will enjoy a lot more than free champagne and extra legroom

At the start of the next century airlines will be providing their more affluent passengers with the sort of amenities they might expect at five-star hotels.

Imagine, if you are one of the privileged few, that you and your spouse are on a non-stop, 12-hour flight from London to Tokyo, departing Heathrow at 4pm. As you board, you ask the steward to book you a table for dinner at the restaurant. Once the plane has settled into its cruising altitude you repair to your double bedroom, get changed into your sports gear and spend a vigorous half hour exercising in the gym. You go back to your bedroom, have a shower, change into your evening clothes and go for a pre-dinner cocktail at the bar.

After dinner you look in at the casino, play a few hands of blackjack and at, say, 8.30pm London time you return to your room to watch a video, read a book - or whatever - prior to enjoying a sound six or seven hour's sleep on a fully horizontal bed, wrapped up in a duvet, clinging to the one you love. You arrive in Tokyo at noon local time, rested, amused and happy in the knowledge that you have not wasted half a day of your life, that you would not have spent a more satisfying and relaxing time had you remained on terra firma.

Virgin Atlantic has such a vision in mind for a fleet of 16 A340-600 Airbuses it has ordered for delivery in the year 2002. Boeing has plans to offer similar arrangements for airlines that purchase a souped-up version of its state-of-the-art 777s, two-engined aircraft that will carry some 300 passengers on non-stop flights up to 18 hours long.

The idea of the casinos is Boeing's, though its present plans for sleeping accommodation are less luxurious than Virgin's, consisting not of double bedrooms but of sleeping berths arranged like bunks on overnight trains.

All these extra features will be accommodated in a new space below the main cabin. Sections of the cargo holds will be hollowed out and refurbished for the use of first class passengers. For the air-travelling rump who fly economy class, on the other hand, no plans are under way to relieve the martyrdom of the long-haul flight.

The gap between rich and poor will widen, and your bitterness as an economy passenger, knowing that you will be arriving at your destination exhausted, facing several days of jet-lag, will be heightened by the awareness that while you and your neighbours are penned in like cattle, the passengers down below are rejoicing in the airborne equivalent of a night at Caesar's Palace.

The conclusion of an exhaustive American study into passenger comfort aboard 67 airlines worldwide is that "a flight in a coach/economy cabin feels like a stint in an Iron Maiden". Consumer Reports, a highly regarded publication similar to Which? magazine, gathered what it called the "dismal" statistics on the leg-room and seat width the airlines provide for economy passengers and awarded scores out of 100 to measure overall comfort. Any score below 69 meant "misery".

A comparison of the performance of the 24 airlines out of the 67 that fly Boeing 747s showed that the two least comfortable airlines on economy class were Virgin and British Airways. Consumer Reports, whose 60-year reputation for impartiality rests on a policy of refusing to carry advertising, awarded Virgin a comfort score of 66; BA, 68. The space between seat rows was 30in on Virgin economy, the lowest of any airline; on BA it was 31in. This compares with, say, Canadian Airways and two Japanese carriers (ANA and JAL), that provide 34in of space in their 747s and score 76 on comfort.

Three or four inches may not sound like significant dimensions until you take into account that just one inch may mark the difference between spending a 12-hour flight with your knees jammed into the back of the seat in front of you, or enjoying the relative convenience of unimpaired blood flow all the way down to your toes.

Presented with the results of the Consumer Reports study, Kate Gay, a BA spokeswoman, said that the space between rows of seats ("seat pitch" is the technical term) was only one element contributing to overall comfort level. "Another is the amount of living space within the seat", a factor to which BA has apparently dedicated a great deal of ergonomic ingenuity.

Virgin's response is that it compensates for the "Iron Maiden" factor with a world-class abundance of bread and circuses. Paul Moore, a Virgin spokesman, noted that the airline provides individual video screens on economy, complete with film channels and Nintendo games; an international award-winning standard of food; and a famously cheerful, easy-going cabin staff. "We believe we completely exceed British Airways in terms of entertainment and quality of service we provide on economy," Mr Moore said.

Virgin might well outdo any other airline flying 747s - as long as the passengers are TV-addicted adults of below average height. Airbuses, too: on the A340s Virgin currently has in service, the seat space in economy was again the most niggardly of five airlines tested.

One concession Virgin has in mind for its 2002 generation hotels-in-the- sky is to move the economy lavatories down below, so as to avoid the usual unseemly crowding in the aisles. The danger for the airline, of course, is that by allowing the upstairs rabble to catch a glimpse of the aerial lifestyles of the downstairs elite, it might provoke a spate of on-board rebellions.

But the wonder is that such rebellions have not been seen already, that the economy fliers of the world have yet to unite against a system of oppression so pervasive that future generations will look back on these times and marvel at humanity's meekness, sacrifice and patience in the face of such wholesale abuse.