FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT

NEW YORK - Modern air travel, to paraphrase the sage Dr. Samuel Johnson, offers all the joys of prison, plus the chance to crash - as wretched passengers packed into a Canadian Air Transat charter flight discovered recently when their aircraft ran out of fuel over the Atlantic and barely managed to reach the Azores on a wing and a prayer.

When I was young, you bought a moderately-priced ticket from your nice neighborhood travel agent, dressed up in your best clothes, and leisurely boarded a flight on which `economy' seats were as wide and well-spaced as those in today's business class. Pretty, young stewardesses smiled and waited on you.

These days, air travel has become Sovietized: monopoly carriers that treat passengers like convicts; surly flight crews who act like prison guards; nightmarish airports that have become aero-gulags; and cattle-car flights on which you can contract such cosmopolitan maladies as deep vein thrombosis, TB, meningitis, Asian scrofula, Zambezi River Fever, and Meniere's Disease.

In short, Soviet service at capitalist prices. North American air carriers increasingly resemble the USSR's national airline, Aeroflot(known to pilots as `aeroplop'), notorious for outrageous delays, mysterious cancellations, equipment failure, and passenger abuse. The main difference: the old Aeroflot used to charge peanuts for flights, while today's monopolistic mega-carriers gouge their customers before tormenting them.

Air carriers have adopted a whole new jargon designed to make fleecing the public easier:

• Hubs - Centralized prison camps into which air travelers are funneled, dumped, and often forgotten. If your connection time in any of these modern gulags is less than 2.5 hours, chances are 87.3% your luggage will remain behind, or end up in Papua New Guinea.

• Code Sharing - Airline doubletalk for cartel. Supposedly competing airlines divvy up business, sharing routes and revenue. This is clearly illegal, but airlines manage to get away with it due to big political contributions. I was once booked to Paris on Air France. To my horror, the flight turned out to be a code share on Air Togo, the carrier of a very small, obscure African country run by His Excellency, President-for-Life Omar Bongo. Flyers to Moscow on Delta beware: you could end up on son of Aeroflot.

• Direct Flights - You'd think `direct' means going from A to B, but not in airlingo. I'm planning a flight to Hong Kong. The airline schedule says `direct,' but when you read the ultra-fine print, there's a refreshing, 1.5 hour stop at beautiful Anchorage, Alaska airport at 0330 AM.

• Business Class - The 21st century version of 1960's and 70's economy class. Today's economy-steerage class is a purgatory cleverly created by airlines to make passengers so miserable that those with any money are forced to fly outrageously expensive business class.

• First Class - Only affordable by government officials, heads of charities, movie stars, and the UN.

• Rental Cars - An integral part of air travel, and a brilliant idea thought up in 1945 by Warren Avis. Hertz and Avis have good service in North America, but a warning to travelers: Hertz in Europe is totally unreliable. Over the past three years, Hertz has fouled up every reservation I had in Europe, never had the right cars, and told me to go to hell(or to Chicago-O'Hare airport, take your pick) when I complained. This year in Rome, when I went to Hertz to pick up my specially reserved Alfa Romeo sports car, I was offered a blue Euro-Disney family van, and told `take it or leave it.' Avoid Hertz like the plague. Use Avis, Budget, or Eurocar.

• Fares - Travel agents used to help get you the best fares. But now that warm-hearted airlines are trying to destroy these small businesses by cutting their commissions, you have to figure fares yourself. This, however, is easy. First, go to the Oracle of Delphi for basic fare structure. Then fax it to Madame Lazonga, the gypsy fortune teller in Bucharest, then consult the Tibetan Book of the Dead, multiply by .07654, divide by pi, and send the results by river steamer to the Fare Calculation Center in Bobo Dioulasso, Burkino Faso(formerly Upper Volta), and await your answer.

• Ticket Restrictions - These are `discount' fares that prevent you from flying on Fridays, even-numbered days, Greek saint's birthdays, during half-moons, in the morning or afternoon, anytime around holidays, and when the airlines have lots of business. To get a slightly less punitive fares, business travelers must spend Saturday night in Oshkosh or Pickle Lake, attend church the next morning, and sing `Oh Susana' in Turkestani.

• Air Rage - The result of imprisonment, torture, mental abuse, fear, uncertainty, intolerable crowding, pig swill meals, lost luggage, surly staffs, filthy air, and screaming babies - who should be put in the back of the plane. Humans behave just like rats packed into a maze. The next step after air rage: mass cannibalism.

• Air - A substance too precious to be lavished on passengers. Caring airlines have cut down fresh air in their aircraft by 50% to save heating it, making their planes one of the best places on earth to catch airborne diseases.

Hats off to the brilliant airline CEO's who managed to turn once elegant, enjoyable air travel into pestilential prisons in the sky.