What are some ways to handle flight information?
looks like you have done a good analysis of the options. Here is one extra one - add CiviCRM to a Drupal website - make the Drupal website theme match your joomla one - push folks through to the Drupal site - and then make use of Views and Webforms to deliver all the bits that you can't do via Joomla.

Possibly not the answer you want, but trade-off might be doing a fair amount of workaround/customisation with joomla, versus having a different front end for civicrm and getting a bunch of drupal tools that will take care of a lot of what i see you need.