We flew back from a week’s holiday in the UK yesterday, and were thrilled by an unexpected upgrade to business class. But it seems a bit frivolous now, in light of the probable crash of Air France Flight 447.
The decadence of the free flowing drinks, the frequent hot towels and extra crawling space for the kids 
makes you forget that you could easily fly into harm’s way.
Most air catastrophes seem to occur early in the flight: it looks like this one happened three hours after take-off, when passengers were probably snoozing, or happily buzzed on the free drinks.
So maybe the moment of terror, when people realized that they were experiencing more than just turbulence, was brief.
Reverse Culture Shock 