Ask the pilot

Powder-blue seats, mauve curtains and golfing in Siberia. It's the strange, sometimes beautiful language of airliner cabins.

By Patrick Smith

Read more: Technology & Business, Business, P. Smith, Ask the Pilot

Jan. 26, 2007 | Last week, Boeing unveiled a cabin mock-up of its new 747-8, scheduled for rollout in 2010. Those who've seen it are agog over the plane's interior architecture. According to a story from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the mock-up reveals "a world of soft curves, blue mood lighting and a sweeping entryway designed to take the boredom out of flying." Said Klaus Brauer, Boeing's director of customer satisfaction and revenue marketing (there's a yin-yang of a title for you): "The goal is to reconnect people with flying." They'll be doing that, or trying to, with arched ceilings, extra large windows, and the kinds of colors and patterns that, in Brauer's words, "you see when you dream of flying."

All well and good, though hype over the 747-8's innards reminds me somewhat of the grandiose plans for lower-deck lounges and piano bars on the original 747. Besides, once the airlines get hold of it, they'll be cramming in the seats and redecorating to their heart's content. To a large extent, a plane's interior will only be as impressive as its operator allows it to be. When airlines dream of flying, they may not see the same colors that Klaus Brauer does.

Meanwhile, responding to my comments about the terrible new Air-India livery a week ago, reader "Rachel C" submitted the following, still posted in Salon's online letters section: "So long as they keep that funky wallpaper on the inside, who cares about the outside?"

More on that wallpaper a bit later, but Rachel and Klaus got me thinking. Heaven knows I've spent enough time critiquing the tastefulness, or lack thereof, of various airline paint schemes. Maybe it's time to move this Sister Wendy act inside the plane. An airline's exterior scheme, I've always maintained, should evoke the imagery of its native country. Failing that, it ought to convey some spirit of the airline itself. Does this obligation not extend to the interior as well?

At the very least, the inside and the outside should work together in fomenting brand identity; both are large canvases providing ample opportunity for an airline to express itself. But perhaps it's the cabin where most of the focus should be. Carriers consign millions of dollars to big-name firms like Landor and Onoma to develop flashy liveries and emblems, yet their customers hardly notice. Gone are the days when people crowded into airport observation decks, like bird spotters in a tree hide, gawking at aircraft as they taxied past. Who among passengers even looks at his or her plane anymore? Heck, many departure gates don't have windows, while an increasing number of terminals are constructed in ways that, intentionally or not, prevent people from seeing outside. The real captive audience is sitting there in the cabin -- often for long hours at a time. Why not take advantage?

That's not to say, for instance, that KLM should splatter its cabins with chintzy windmills or Rembrandt lithographs. Neither are we yearning to see overhead bins turned into subway-style billboards or, as you'll already find on some airlines, tray tables plastered with advertisements. But an airplane's décor should, one way or the other, speak the language of its owners.

Delta did this quite well, I thought, with its now shuttered low-fares offshoot, Song. Whether or not you subscribed to the Song verve (it could be, at times, a bit too vivacious), it was all around you, from the lime- and tangerine-colored leather to the pre-departure music piped over the P.A. system.

As for that "funky wallpaper" aboard Air-India, most of it is gone now, sadly, replaced by conventional white paneling. In years past, millions of fliers enjoyed the elaborately illustrated sidewalls of the carrier's Boeing 707s and 747s. The designs varied plane to plane, concentrating on various mythological and religious themes from ancient India -- tales from the Mahabharata, depictions of the Buddha, etc. Google wasn't much help in tracking down examples, but I was fortunate to obtain this image, courtesy of a reader. The photographer asks to remain anonymous, but the year is 1981, and the airplane is a Boeing 747 named the "Emperor Kanishka." (Tragically, this was the very same aircraft blown up over the North Atlantic by Sikh extremists in June 1985, still the fifth-worst aviation catastrophe on record.)

Such fanciness used to be fairly common. A flip through one of my favorite books, Keith Lovegrove's "Airline -- Identity, Design and Culture," shows off a plethora of richly decorated cabins from decades past. Nowadays, it's easy to grow tired of off-white bins and flecked-gray paneling, but the frequency at which planes are sold, swapped and traded makes customizing every nook and cranny prohibitively expensive. A shame, really, because think of the potential: Royal Air Maroc doing up the walls in the tile-work motif of a Marrakech mosque; Garuda Indonesia coloring its planes with batik.

Seats, on the other hand, are still readily embellished. The results aren't always pleasant, but one way airlines differentiate themselves is by choice of upholstery. Normally there are separate schemes for economy, business and first class. Virtually every reputable airline has its own distinct style. It can be fun watching a movie or TV show, trying to pick out which airline was used for a shoot based on the seat cushions.

An upholstery update might come in conjunction with a total image makeover, but often it comes sooner. The constant wear and tear on seats means they need to be replaced periodically, giving frequent opportunity -- maybe too frequent -- for tinkering. Because of this, there's often a noticeable disconnect between an airline's seating schemes and its signature colors. Even the handsomest choices are often arbitrarily out of sync with the rest of the airplane.

Next page: This Airbus A330 looks vaguely like the inside of my grandmother's house