I spent September literally living in airports. I was on assignment in "Airworld"—the limbo on the far side of the metal detectors—and during what was essentially a three-week layover, I toe-touched a dozen cities from Los Angeles to Singapore (the long way around), flew 26,000 miles, and once spent 18 consecutive hours in the air. But it wasn't until a few weeks ago, after I had missed my American Airlines flight to San Francisco and had to fly stand-by in a middle seat, with no live satellite television, no movies, and definitely no Wi-Fi to keep me occupied, that I bothered to crack the spine on an in-flight magazine.

It wasn't that I had failed to notice them during my three weeks in the air. On the contrary, I had dutifully swiped copies from every airline and schlepped them around the world—United's Hemispheres, Delta Sky, American Way, Southwest's Spirit, Frontier's Wild Blue Yonder, British Airways' High Life, and even Singapore Airlines' Silver Kris.

Your standard-issue in-flight magazine is an exercise in licensing. Editing, production, and ad sales are farmed out by the airlines to one of a handful of custom publishers who edit, produce, and sell ads for the magazines in exchange for the lion's share of the revenues. In exchange, the airlines receive a royalty fee and a cut of the profits. It's a mutually beneficial relationship that flies in the face of the airline industry's otherwise bleak financial picture. Pace Communications, for example, is solidly profitable even though two of its three largest clients—United, Delta and U.S. Airways—are in Chapter 11, while the third (U.S. Airways) only recently emerged. American Airlines, meanwhile, is one of the few that produces its own magazines in-house. Its four-title stable, which includes American Way, Spirit, and separate first-class and Spanish-language titles, has been more steadily profitable since 9/11 than the airline itself.

In an effort to get the word out that his own magazines were flying high, even if United and Delta weren't, Pace's chief marketing and sales officer Craig Waller tracked me down. "We have the very unique distinction of being the publisher for three bankrupt airlines," he joked at the time. "We're a very underappreciated sector of the media. When you're in Europe, you'll see that the magazines there are much more upscale. There's the same commitment to editorial excellence here, but if you talk to anyone who doesn't travel, or a 24-year-old media planner, there's nothing to read. We had a meeting with someone at [the advertising agency] Mindshare not long ago, and she was surprised to learn we weren't just recycling editorial from other magazines. The reality is, we make a huge effort." As proof, he offered the example of Delta Sky, which relaunched this fall with a fresh look by Robert Priest (the David Childs of magazine design) and a splashy party at MoMA that would have made any Condé Nast publisher proud.

Speaking of Condé, the median household income of Pace's readership is $106,731 according to MRI, a touch higher than Condé Nast Traveler's $101,102, the highest of any mainstream magazine. Add that stat to Pace's combined readership of 7 million per month (a figure calculated with the help of the dark art of pass around) and it's no wonder that Hemispheres', Attaché's, and Sky's ad pages were up 30.8 percent, 24 percent and 12.2percent, respectively, through October. American Way's have risen 17.7 percent and Southwest's Spirit's 26.8 percent. And these gains are on top of double-digit percentage increases last year.

And yet, despite that resolutely rosy outlook—the planes are full, the passengers are rich, and we're everywhere—my gut feeling is the opposite after my time in Airworld. Perusing these magazines at home only confirmed it: They're on the brink of a long fall back into irrelevance and possible extinction if they don't stop coasting and overhaul themselves right now.

EASY TO IGNORE
How did I manage to avoid them altogether for three weeks? It wasn't hard when I had 24 channels of live satellite TV in my seatback on both JetBlue and Song, plus even more elaborate diversions when flying abroad—an actual bar in Virgin's Upper Class, or the Mandarin Chinese language instruction available through Singapore Airlines' entertainment system. I never accepted Frontier's invitation to sample its own in-flight TV, nor did I have the opportunity to web surf with Lufthansa's and SAS' on-board Wi-Fi. And when the FAA inevitably relaxes rules on cell phone use during flight, it may become impossible to even concentrate on a magazine.

The fracturing of media consciousness that took decades down on the ground will happen in the air within another 5 to 10 years. That should be enough time for advertisers seeking the road warrior demo to investigate the airlines' and airports' own efforts to steal a slice of the advertising pie. Those include everything from tray-table ads on U.S. Airways flights (courtesy of Sky Media), to competing magazines like Washington Flyer, a city title sponsored by Washington D.C.'s airport authority for travelers passing through the city's Ronald Reagan and Dulles airports.

Collectively they suffer from the same genetic deficiency that killed a generation of giant-circulation, general-interest titles like Life and afflicts Reader's Digest and TV Guide today, which is to say that they are sans edge in an era that prizes knowingness and snarkiness above all.

A quick tour of the latest issues produces the following: American Way's cover subject, b-lister actress Mariska Hargitay, walks the interviewer through her very favorite places in Manhattan as part of the magazine's usual conceit (although with different cities each time). What did she choose? You know... Nobu. Babbo. The SoHo Grand. Barneys. The usual.

Over at Hemispheres, there's a pair of features ripped straight from the headlines of Food + Wine—a lament against Robert Parker, the emperor of wine, and an anointing of America's best new chefs. At Attaché, there's an excursion to the Yucatan, a golf column, and a shorter piece on great pizza). And in Delta Sky—which now looks gorgeous—there are stories on Atlanta's up-and-coming neighborhoods, writing children's books, grizzly bears, margarita recipes... and about a million other disconnected pieces strung together in the name of general interest.

The problem with these stories and their presence in the mix isn't that they are bad, but that they are safe. They're the same stories on sale at the airport's newsstand, and in most cases, they suffer by comparison. I blame the clients—the airlines—for this, because if there's one thing they're obsessed with, it's safety. But it's up to the publishers to give their readers—the passengers—a better reason to read their magazine than simply being there.

EXPERIMENT, EXPERIMENT, EXPERIMENT
You may compete with satellite TV, but you're not being sold on newsstands and you don't need celebrities on the cover. My favorite in-flight magazine is Carlos, created for Virgin Atlantic's Upper Class passengers by the British custom publisher John Brown Citrus Publishing. Carlos is more of a quarterly curio than a typical magazine with an FOB, feature well, and back of the book.

It's pamphlet sized, printed between cardboard covers and illustrated entirely with pencil drawings, and the subject matter matters only to the media-savvy "jetrosexuals" which populate Upper Class (at least in Virgin's imagination.) One of the copies I begged Virgin for two years ago had an illustrated Kate Moss on the cover and contained an extended meditation on the personal style that launched a thousand knockoffs at Topshop and H&M. Other features in that issue included a piece on digital music piracy and a vintage Tom Wolfe profile of Phil Spector from the '60s. Carlos neither looks nor reads like any magazine you'd find in a seatback or on a newsstand, which is how is manages to distract its media-savvy audience from the on-board bar just long enough to peek at the full-color inserts for Marc Jacobs, Paul Smith, and Mulberry.

The general rules of magazine making don't necessarily apply at 40,000 feet. If we're starting from the assumption that these educated, affluent readers are trapped in aluminum tubes with hours at their disposal, why not make in-flight magazines the final preserve for long-form journalism, publishing the same sort of mega-features as The New York Times magazine's recent retelling of last December's tsunami?

Considering the lower cost structures and surging profits, there should be plenty of cash on hand to lure A-list writers into the magazines, thus raising their profiles (by republishing these stories on their websites) and inspiring every other freelancer out there to bring their A-games when fulfilling assignments. If there's one thing that's hurt the reputation of in-flight magazines, it's the perception that no one is reading them, or at least no one the writers know. (I had the same feeling when—full disclosure—I wrote a piece for another one of John Brown's magazines earlier this year.)

Or why not try the reverse—a magazine filled with nothing but news readers can use, with the centerpieces being stories in which everything—airfare, hotel, skiing lessons, etc.—is bookable at a click on the magazine's website. It's published by an airline, after all. Where's the integration? Where's the added value? Give me something more than what I can find on the newsstand… or on TV.

REMEMBER THE LADIES
Women read these magazines, too. The advertising should reflect that. The road warrior cliché—the middle-aged guy's guy predisposed toward Dockers, Samsonite, whiskey, and a fine cigar—is true… up to a point. The audience research firm Arbitron released a study last year confirming that the 17 million or so frequent flyers in America are three times more likely to make $100,000 a year than the general population, that they skew about 60-40 male, and that they comprise 60 percent of all advertising impressions in Airworld.

So it should be no surprise that ad sales staffs have locked in on this demographic, to the annoyance of the 7 million women plying their trades in the sky. I met up with one such road warrior at O'Hare named Jennifer Moody. When she isn't jetting all over the country as co-founder of her own consulting business, she's the moderator of the "Women Travelers" forum on the online frequent-flyer community FlyerTalk. Over drinks at the Red Carpet Club, Moody expressed her irritation at the publishers' obsession.

She once discovered a job posting on American Airlines' site for an editor at American Way. The posting described the magazine's readers as "upper-middle class affluent males in their 40," she said. "Apparently they've made some determination that these are their readers. Not that I even flip through it. It gets boring looking at ads for matchmaking services, cigars and condos in Miami."

She forgot to mention the steakhouse chains, mail-order dress shirts, and gadgets of every persuasion. But she's right to be annoyed, and—are you listening, publishers?—she owns her own business. Isn't she someone worth pursuing? The ads say just as much about your magazine as the editorial does.

To his credit, Pace's Craig Waller already seems to get all of this. He pitched jetBlue on a magazine and was shown the writing on the wall when the airline turned him down. He knows Carlos well, having published magazines for BA, Virgin Express, and another low-fare carrier during his publishing career in the U.K. And he's doing his best to win more upscale advertisers for his titles.

"Why is it," he asks rhetorically, "if we have the readers with the highest incomes out there, that we have a bunch of direct-response ads in the magazine? We're only just embarking on a concerted campaign to fix that now." He added, "I think we need to be innovative, and I don't think this generation is print adverse. In-flight Wi-Fi is going to be held back by the costs, and print, for the time being is the delivery vehicle of choice."

But for how much longer? You'll know the answer yourself the next time you fly.