I did watch a documentary recently about inflight catering and apparently the curry is one of the dishes that seems to hold its flavour at altitude. They put in about 20% higher amounts of spice to compensate the taste buds going numb when flying.

I find a piece of chicken and some veg to be an extremely bland meal on the ground let alone on a plane.

my theory is that when sitting at the back or close to the back, go for the item that has spices in it.