Probably find that there is a story within a story here if anyone bothered to look deeper into this.
My guess is that the writer might have found that the rest of his fellow passengers were not respective enough of his great and surperior intelligence, talent and presence and were more interested in having as good a time as they could in what might have been for some, the one major adventure of their lives.
This does seem to have a certain "I'll teach them all a lesson" aspect to it despite his attempt to muddy the bitter bile in his message with his expression of concern for our collective futures.