Airline Travel

I was recently on a flight from DC to Los Angeles. I find the whole experience of air travel to be more than a little frustrating. Security in the airport is inadequate/incompetent on its best day. Travel with a carry on skydiving rig and it tends to make the situation worse. Then there are the seats! Seats on commercial planes seem to be getting smaller, and closer to other seats. When I fly I tend to not want to carry on much conversation with my seat mates. I am not anti social by any stretch, and I love to meet new people...just not on planes for some reason. Maybe its that by the time I finally make it to my seat in the plane I am so irked from dealing with everything that has to be dealt with at an airport that I just dont want to speak. I just want to relax and get through the flight. I am not rude by any stretch but I definitely put out the "I dont want to talk to you vibe".
So on this recent trip to LA I was in the middle seat. Not my favorite place to be at all. So I arrive at my seat to find I am seated between two of the largest people I have ever seen on an airplane (one needed the seat belt extension and it was still tight). They are both so big that they had the arm rests up, and I literally could not see all of my seat because these two people were spilling out of their seats into mine. This plane was completely full so I could not ask a flight attendant for another seat. So there I was looking at this impossibly small patch of seat fabric thinking that LA is not going anywhere do I really want to endure what I am about to endure on a non-stop flight? I squeeze myself into the seat,pull out my book, and try to forget that I now know what it must be like to be a sardine. I have only had two travel experiences more unpleasant than this one...a redeye train to NYC on Christmas eve, and a C-130 full of puking marines out of TQ Airbase near Fallujah. The person to my right wanted to chat...I quickly put a stop to that, and the person to my left was double fisting choclate chip cookies from a huge bag of chips ahoy. Everytime she dug into the bag she elbowed me in the ribs. So I spent most of that flight trying to remember if the people that were now using every bit of real estate in their seats, and encroaching on the real estate in my seat, actually paid for any of my seat. I dont recall the airline telling me I would have to share my tiny little seat...the folks sitting "next" to me certainly did not offer to pay for the portion of the seat they were using. It really pissed me off. We can put a man on the moon in 1969, and here it is 2007 and we cant make air travel comfortable. Seriously...if you are too big for one seat the airline should make you pay for two! Or an even better solution...an airline just for big people! The Lane Bryant of air travel if you will...I dunno...thats my rant for the day...