If airline food is to cuisine as the Central Intelligence Agency is to intelligence (we found many shell casings, but strangely no one was about), it isn't all the airline's fault.

The noodles one nibbles aboard Philippine Airlines Flight 305 at 37,500 feet face a daunting challenge. Airline food is usually prepared as much as 24 hours before anyone gets to eat it. Passengers are further handicapped by cabin pressurisation and dry air that can reduce their ability to taste anything at all by up to 35 per cent, which may explain at least partly that cardboard quality to the braised beef.

To find out what's what in airline food, we reported to Cathay Pacific's vast flight kitchens in the company of a genial ex-British Army chef named Leslie Bailey, the marketing and customer services manager, at Chek Lap Kok. Here, refrigerated trucks and loaders deliver more than 44,000 meals a day to 33 airlines running alphabetically from Aeroflot to Vietnam Airlines.

They don't all get the same meals. All 33 design their own menus and 1,524 chefs, sous-chefs and production and operations personnel get them out. So if you want to complain about the chefs at Mekong Airlines, they are cooking in the same kitchens as the chefs at Ethiopian.

Probably, the chefs say, Emirates, the fast-growing Dubai-based airline, carries the most luxurious menu. Nonetheless, Asia's premier carriers - Cathay and Singapore Airlines in particular - do their best to maintain standards.

It is an astringent operation to say the least. Cathay Pacific Catering Services (HK) follows NASA hygiene standards, and for much the same reason. Just as nobody could bear the thought of astronauts with, uhm, digestive problems in outer space, nobody could bear the thought of a 747 full of 450-odd passengers with, um, digestive problems on a 16-hour flight to London.

Accordingly, booties, lab coat, snood and face mask are de rigeuer for a visit to the flight kitchen - a 50,400-square-metre facility spread over three floors. Sampling, say, a canape off Emirates Airlines' first-class menu would get your hand slapped. It is an enormous operation that doesn't include just food. Everything that lands at Chek Lap Kok comes off the airplanes, including the pillows and blankets, and moves in the back door of the kitchen facility. Some 42,000 to 45,000 items are taken off the average 747. Even newspapers and in-flight magazines are ironed, as long as they are still current, and sent back out.

This is a kitchen that produces an average of 10,000 omelettes a day, ooked on a specially designed turntable that rotates 10 non-stick omelette pans past the chefs every minute. The burners are so hot that they cook an omelette in 20 seconds. But it's still all in the wrist, just like it is at Le Cirque.

So how's the food?

There is a difference if it is cooked in the Cathay flight kitchen on the bottom floor of the facility at Chek Lap Kok, rather than at 37,500 feet a day later. But certain things have to remain the same.

To a great extent, delicacy is out the window. These are meals that must be sturdy enough to be chilled to 4 degrees Celsius and below, bundled on to airplanes and flown halfway around the world to be reheated and served. That pretty much rules out a souffle, for instance.

Undaunted, Jorg Kubisz, the executive chef, arranged a tasting menu put together in conjunction with the kitchens of The Peninsula, Hong Kong's luxury hotel, for Cathay Pacific's first-class passengers.

It should be pointed out that this isn't what they get in the back of the bus, where newspaper reporters are usually relegated. Lunch starts

Not something you expect to see 35,000 ft above sea level

with a nice dollop of sevruga caviar with creme fraiche, not to mention some very nice salmon. There's none of that back in monkey class. First-class cabin food is served on plates and dished out by flight attendants, which always helps, especially when they swing by with the wine bottle.

As an example of the hardy quality of the entrees, they include a grilled beef tenderloin filet in a natural jus that, even reheated, is still enjoyably pink in the centre and tender enough.

But this is basically a piece of meat that the flight attendant could hit with a hammer, and it is still going to be edible. Likewise, while lobster thermidor sounds luxurious with its lashings of heavy cream, egg yolks and bechamel sauce, it is relatively indestructible.

There is an equally yummy lamb chop with leeks in what is described as ``gravy''. If lamb isn't rare, it isn't good. Chef Kubisz pulls this off as well.

There is also pan-fried sea bass, which can cause Bailey to wax lyrical because, he says, it is another of the few fish dishes that is virtually indestructible. Sea bass, he says, can stand up to almost anything and retain its texture. (It is also somewhat controversial. Sea bass are actually Patagonian toothfish, which environmentalists charge are being fished to extinction by seiners dragging kilometre-long drift nets.)

The question is where will it all develop from here. One tiny dot on the horizon, as pilots say, is no-frills airlines which, in the United States and Europe, first reduced passengers to right fielders making spectacular one-handed catches of the sandwiches flung at them by surly flight attendants. They reduced them still further to buying their own food in the terminal to carry on board and eat in their 40-centimetre-wide seats.

Bailey and other Cathay catering service executives believe that while the no-frills carriers may well eat up the short-haul market, they aren't going to threaten those 16-hour flights from Vancouver to Hong Kong. And on those 16-hour flights, people are going to want something to eat.

So why not make it Oscietra caviar and balik salmon Tsar Nicolai, and the wild mushroom ragout with asparagus on toasted ciabatta, and the sauteed prawns and cucumber chilli paste, and the ricotta cannelloni with semi-sun-dried tomato sauce, and the prawns with the snow fungus and chrysanthemum in clear broth?

Go ahead, they’re all pretty sturdy.

Reese Deveaux - Restaurant and food critic. All Rights Reserved.