Cool idea.
RTl-SDR is a good tool for ultra compact ultra flexible scanning, recieving, and recording, can even use it on my old Nokia N900 with a USB adapter and host mode. Though in my experience the recieve quality is crap compared to a purpose designed radio, even with a freq cut wire antenna, still one of the way coolest hacks you can do for $8(free shipping). On microwave freqs the antenna gets pretty small and if it is out of frequency range you can even use a LNB but not sure how it would look assembling a dish antenna in coach.
For those interested look for a PAL DVB-T USB gadget, the ones I currently have have R820T and RTL2832U chips onboard.
(edit)
Probably the coolest thing you can do with a cheap DVB-T SDR on a plane is run dump1090, receive the ADS-B live from ATC and other planes when in range if your antenna, it is pretty neat all the way around though in a plane you will need to cache the maps for your flyover area. I suspect the expensive ADS-B receivers for tabets in airplane stuff catalogs are just Arduino type embedded systems running Linux, using a Realtek SDR like above, and running WiFi host mode with dump1090 being the only web service available.
(day later edit) And today we have this story, bet we can get the mobile signal if you have the right seat facing.
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