Ask the pilot

The strange underworld of airliner porn, and the geeks who make it happen.

By Patrick Smith

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

April 27, 2007 | Next time your favorite television show makes a trip to the airport, look closely at that jetliner cabin scene. Chances are it's one of Richard Chan's warehouse planes. Chan is the founder and CEO of Aero Mock-Ups, a facility in North Hollywood, Calif., stocked with replica fuselage sections and thousands of aviation-themed props. He has been in business for 20 years, having built the entertainment industry's premier go-to facility.

From the street, the low-slung cluster of sheds, pallets and storage containers would pass for a salvage yard if it weren't for the orange windsock that flies above the office. Passersby would be startled to know that hundreds of shows, motion pictures and commercials have been filmed here. Hanging on a back wall are the autographed pictures of the many Hollywood heavyweights who've passed through.

The interior shells are constructed by hand, mostly from plywood. Keeping in mind the need to accommodate lighting, camera gear and air conditioning, some of them are, let's just say, reasonable approximations. But not all of the inventory is artificial. Most of Chan's stock is the real thing, encompassing almost every imaginable prop. Need a galley cart, a row of overhead bins, a cabin sidewall panel or an FAA-approved flotation device? There's one around somewhere.

Most noticeable are hundreds of scavenged airline seats -- blocks of two, three and four; coach, business and first -- stacked like Legos on floor-to-ceiling rows of metal shelving.

"Those, I think, are from Ansett," says Chan, pointing toward a pair of oversize chairs in hideous gray leather. Ansett is a defunct carrier from Australia. Understandably, there's a decidedly outdated look to many of the cushions, their patterns and colors showing off an array of retired schemes and post-deregulation knockouts. I spot plenty of '80s-vintage United, American, Pan Am, Braniff and Eastern.

I'm astounded to discover one of civil aviation's most iconic objects shoved anonymously into a corner: an actual spiral staircase scavenged from the first-class section of a retired 747. Closer inspection reveals an Air Canada logo, and I try to imagine the thousands of travelers who had spun themselves up and down these very steps over the decades, on their way to Paris, Rome, Hong Kong. The fiberglass and aluminum helix looks forlorn amid the detritus. In fact everything looks forlorn, in what amounts to a sort of airliner chop shop -- the remains of dead planes scattered around like the flukes and skeletons on the deck of a whaling ship.

Chan's office is past a set of glass doors at the end of a short hallway. Chatting with him, I notice a set of airplane seats off to one side -- a conversation piece. To the layperson, there's nothing particularly unusual about them. To me, their slate-gray leather and tapering backs give them away.

"Those are from Concorde, aren't they," I say.

Chan's eyes widen. "Yes, they are. British Airways." He is disarmingly polite, and his words are marked with a faded British lilt. There's a practical, hardscrabble feel to Chan's operation, but five minutes in his presence and it's clear that he didn't get into this weird business by fluke. He knows the industry inside and out, and can tell a 727-100 from a 727-200 by the shape of its intakes or the number of emergency exits. And I venture he can tell you precisely which aircraft that cannibalized stairway was taken from.

Chan is a licensed pilot and passenger safety advocate, having served as an advisor to both the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board. Not to slight the impressiveness of his résumé, but becoming the proprietor of an establishment like Aero Mock-Ups requires a peculiar, almost childlike fascination with planes. It's a fascination that I know too well, as I wander around Chan's warehouse like a kid in a candy store, spellbound by what, in most people's eyes, is little more than junk. On a smaller scale, you might remember my 2003 meeting with Ivan Hoyos, owner of the Plane World hobby store near Miami International Airport. I describe such people, myself among them, as "airliner enthusiasts."

"Airliner enthusiast" is a phrase that pops up frequently in this column, occasionally alternating with "airliner nut." The meaning is probably lost on most people. Airliner enthusiasts are connoisseurs of civil aviation. But the "hobby," for lack of a better term, has little to do with flying per se. What gets our pulse going is not the visceral thrill of flight, the slipping of surly bonds. Rather, it's the grand theater of air travel: the color and craziness of the world's airlines; their route structures and service cultures; the places they go. We're enamored of planes, of course, but we see them less as technical marvels than as romantic symbols. The A.E. beholds the 747 or Concorde much the way an architecture buff beholds the Chrysler Building or the cathedral at Chartres in France. And beyond any inherent beauty, the airplane is nothing without context -- the greater point of going somewhere.

Despite what you might think, we come from all walks of life and an assortment of backgrounds -- we're artists and authors, firefighters and clerks.

Though usually not pilots. Richard Chan and me notwithstanding, the A.E. is seldom a pilot, and most airline pilots don't have anywhere near the industry acumen of a devout A.E. (For what it's worth, a good 50 percent of what I discuss each week on Salon is not common knowledge, or even of interest, to the average airline pilot.) Generally speaking, pilots are enamored of technology and the gratification that comes from hands-on flying. For the A.E. that's only part of it (or sometimes none of it at all). The A.E. would rather be sitting in the economy cabin of an exotic airliner than in the cockpit of a high-performance fighter. As a youngster, the typical pilot hung out at the local grass strip, watching canvas-winged Cubs fly touch-and-goes. The A.E., on the other hand, collected airline souvenirs -- timetables, baggage tags, silverware -- and spent hours poring over the route maps of Aeroflot, British Airways and Cathay Pacific, sounding out the distant cities to which they flew. The pilot will sit down with a copy of Aviation Week for a story on the newest cockpit gadget or GPS navigation enhancement. The A.E. would prefer to read about the history of the Air-India logo. This might come across as self-important, but the A.E.'s passion is, in several ways, a melding of technology and culture.

Nevertheless, in the eyes of most people, ours is a distinctly lowbrow hobby. It lacks the cachet of other, more refined infatuations (as I've written before, we won't be vindicated until the day Ken Burns makes a sepia-toned documentary about the 747), and we bear the stigma of a certain stereotype: nerdy, shy and decidedly unhip. Few modes of transport are more openly reviled nowadays than commercial flying, and skulking around airports with a camera or a pair of binoculars isn't going to win you much respect, or a date with that sexy agent over at the Virgin Atlantic counter. (On the contrary, it's liable to get you taken in for questioning.) This underscores all that is misunderstood about air travel, but we're stuck with it. Thus the A.E. keeps it quiet when among friends or family, usually out of embarrassment. We stay where it's safe -- in the closet.

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