But there is a whole culture of fetishism around these objects, I'm guilty of it myself. Perhaps the people who celebrate the airplane as an object are on the outside so to speak, not the ones operating or purchasing them though.

I find it interesting that people are so quick to correlate capitalism with any form of thinking based on maximizing utility, all economic systems do this to varying degrees of efficiency. A communist system would not build aircraft for any reason other than to move things. I understand that the discussion here is about paradigms of thought and certainly the capitalist mindset does encourage this sort of thinking, but it is present in any large scale human organizational structure to some degree, and more telling of our state of industrial/technological civilization, rather than a direct relationship to economic systems, if the two can be separated.