The technology should work. For noise and interference reasons higher frequencies are preferable. The hard part is persuading airlines to cooperate. It needs to be something like 80% participation before the density is high enough to work. Below that and the inevitable mesh gaps will be too common and will interfere too often. (If you look at the studies of aircraft contrails you find that mesh is a misnomer. There are heavily traveled bands and huge empty areas. This makes it hard to route around an oceanic gap.) Right now airlines are desperate to cut weight to save fuel costs, and they have higher priorities to spend what little money they have. That's a big problem. Who will pay for the communications package and its fuel use?

I fly too often and find that the current success at filling airplanes (over 85% total load factor) means that there is no longer physical room to use a computer on most flights. It's one reason that I use Amtrak on the NEC. My cell phone works there, although the TCP implementations can't deal with the rapid and dramatic variations in network delay and capacity as the trains speed in and out of individual cells. Voice mostly works, data mostly doesn't. Verizon is the exception because they made a deal with Amtrak to put repeaters on the train itself. It seems like there are a dozen people per car on their cell at any given time, and almost half the passengers are using a computer. Having a free standard 110v AC outlet for every seat makes a difference.

There are several companies trying to use aircraft to provide metropolitan service, and if they can manage the operational cost issue it is a good competitor to towers. They get one thing that your mesh would lack. They can use conformal antennae to create ground looking spot beams. This gives tremendous benefits for capacity and data bandwidth. The primary barrier for them is finding an affordable way to keep one or two aircraft overhead on a continuous basis.

The leading candidates are very high altitude UAVs. Right now, the FAA is examining how to change the flight safety rules to permit safe operation of UAVs. If that can be solved, there is then the fuel cost problem. At lower latitudes, e.g., in the tropics, the stratospheric winds are slow enough that a solar/battery combination might be able to hold position over a city for weeks. At higher latitudes the winds are too strong, and a conventional fuel is needed. This means regular up and down shuttling of the UAV and all the attendant fuel costs. IEEE Communications had a good overview of these systems some time last year.