IT COULDN’T GET MUCH WORSE: The Future of Air Travel Is Bliss — Really.

When the taxi drops you off at the airport, you notice your flight doesn’t begin boarding for another 20 minutes — plenty of time. Entering the terminal, you flash a big smile at the discreetly placed infrared cameras that are sending a scan of your gorgeous mug to security central, where facial recognition software matches your likeness to the one on file. You attach the routing tags you printed at home to your Tumi and dump the bag onto the luggage belt, confident you’ll see your rollie again in this lifetime, thanks to the tracking app on your smartphone. You zip through a series of checkpoints: Some read the personal profile on your phone like it’s an airport E-ZPass; at others you stare into an iris-scanning camera or touch a fingerprint-reading pad. A few leisurely minutes later, you step on the plane and greet the flight attendant.

It’s then that you realize you’ve just had your first human interaction since you tipped the cabbie.

So this is really about recognition technology improving and streamlining the airport experience, which is often the worst part of flying. But the airliner of most recent vintage I’ve flown on had so little hip and legroom that even my skinny, 5’10” frame was crowded — and that was the aisle seat.