My relationship with planes is love hate. I hate flying. It makes me have nightmares, it f*cks with my ears, stomach and soul. It makes me drink Bloody Marys. It makes me contemplate the fragility of life with far too much force. The smell of aviation fuel makes me physically weak with fear to the very pit of my being. Sometimes the speed at which we take-off makes me cry...
However I love planes. I love them. Love, love. Yes I do. I don't want to go up in one, but I want to see inside as many passenger jets as possible, old and new. Especially old. I like the Wings video for Silly Love Songs, because I get a look inside and out a chartered 'Wings Around the World,' jet from the 1970s. Curtains instead of blinds? Check. And look, they are yellow! Faux wood interior? Delightful!
I want to see as many aircraft liveries as possible. Especially those on the empennage. Old and new. Especially old. I always have a face to the sky, picking out fancy fuselage (thanks Emirates for painting your undercarriage) and beautiful branded tail fins. I love defunct airliners and their colour schemes and logos. What made them go for those stripes and shapes? And what went wrong? Airlines have to look like they will instill confidence. Company liveries get me excited because not only are they expected to be patriotic (it's not just about pride, it's also so the airport staff on the ground can recognise one jet from another for take off clearance - a problem BA had when they introduced those jazzy 'ethnic' tail fin designs Margaret Thatcher so detested) they also have to make you feel that this is a great airline. An airline which won't pop a wing off in bad weather or burst into flames when someone in row C switches from Pirates of the Caribbean to Track Your Journey (a left-field move, admittedly). Imagine the time and effort that goes into creating art that reflects this.
And who doesn't love a branded sick bag (which, in Quantas' case, if you didn't manage to spray it with gut-chunks, used to double up as a handy pre-addressed envelope to pop your films in for development). I thought I was the only person to begin an airliner sick bag collection when I went travelling, but it turns out I'm not. Check out Rune's 'barfbag' collection at sicksack.com. It's a truly inspirational haul...
I also have a special penchant for Eastern Bloc airliners (just to add to my love of Eastern Bloc most things). Aeroflot has a particular hold over my imagination, mostly because they've been ridiculed and maligned for years and have fought a persistent bad image of rickety craft, drunk pilots, (rumour has it occasionally flying on one engine to save on fuel) and terrifying landings. And the fact their soviet built Tupolev and Ilyushin craft have comically bad reputations with one TU-154 'disintegrating in mid-air.' The supersonic TU-144 (right, above) was an amazingly handsome thing though. And it's interior, with chairs like orange lozenges wrapped in cling-film (top), are like a piece of history space-age Awesome Pie. You can almost smell the polyester, mothballs and repression. But also, it's stunning design in my opinion. It makes sense. Honestly, it's something to behold.
I also adore all the retro advertising, poster and marketing campaigns for airline companies. BOAC, Dan Air, Braniff... There's some really beautiful artwork and graphics going on. It's a lot funkier and a lot less sterile than today.
My next few blogs are going to be airline specials. So if you don't like this:
Look away now...
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