Book Review: Airline - Style at 30,000 Feet by Keith Lovegrove
Style and brand is just an important part of airline revenue generation as data & analytics – this book clearly shows why
Four out of five stars
Budding young economists at university have plenty of maths to do, but they also spend their time looking at pretty pictures. Graphs without numbers are synonymous with the profession, much to the chagrin of engineers. Your favourite airline revenue economist has hazy memories of production frontiers, Edgeworth boxes and Lorenz curves.
But once university is over, those charts become firmly associated with real-world data. Economists skilled in using position, colour and form to tell a story find graphic design just as important as rigorous econometrics in helping a board of directors take a decision.
The airline business is the same. Under the hood is state-of-the-art safety, mechanics and data science, but none of it would help an airline achieve success unless there is a stunning and compelling brand on top. With that in mind I recommend anyone interested in airline economics to read “Airline – Style at 30,000 Feet” by Keith Lovegrove, a design consultant.
Not an inch of space is wasted, with exciting images and a brief accompanying narrative filling every page. It only takes 20 minutes to read a chapter, but that misses the point – it is the pictures that tell the story. Mr Lovegrove has selected a remarkable collection of images, almost all of which I have never seen before with several other similar books in my collection.
Fitting a book of this nature, the aircraft themselves are the backdrop rather than the focus. But even when you have looked at the beautiful pictures for some time and exhausted the main subject, the aircraft in the background have their own beauty too.
First up, ultra-cool uniforms
Reminding us that the airline industry is made by it’s people and not it’s technology, processes and data, Mr Lovegrove starts off with uniforms.
Some great designers are covered, from Emilio Pucci’s colourful suit for Braniff to Paul Costelloe’s well-cut suit for British Airways. I actually met Paul Costelloe and his son Justin when they came to pitch at Qatar Airways tower. Having the chance to inspect some of his work close up was fascinating – the materials were full of interesting weaves which you do not notice at a distance but give the uniform a lot of depth.
It is interesting to see the rather bland and corporate look the Singapore girl wore before Pierre Balmain’s colourful sarongs, and the French designer also provided uniforms for US carrier TWA.
There are some interesting points raised. The rather bizarre plastic bubble helmet for example, designed so that Braniff’s Puccis Galore could preserve their perms against rain and spray in the days before jet bridges.
Yannis Tseklinis’s Olympic ring belt and dress design for Greek flag carrier Olympic Airways is stunning. An interesting picture shows Innez Matthews, Irma Reid and Cindy Medford in their round British Midland hats fresh from receiving their “wings” in 1970 – these ladies were the first flight crew based in the UK who were not white.
Betty Lou Ruble of US flat carrier Pan Am does not look too pleased in her 1955 photo. She is shown drinking a glass of champagne ready to be awarded a prize. Apparently Betty Lou and others had a pedometer strapped to their legs and she had walked the furthest while serving drinks. No wonder she looks a bit grumpy!
Uniforms do have an influence on revenue. As highly visible representatives of an airline, cabin crew out and about in their uniform give a memorable impression that will inspire people to look at an airline and buy tickets.
Some of the brands mentioned (especially US carrier Southwest) would no doubt shudder at the remarks their past executives made, repeated in the book, about the appeal of attractive young women leading to ticket sales.
The author remarks that attitudes have moved on. But airlines today still understand the power of a uniform (rather than the person wearing the uniform) to represent a brand. As he says:
“With the aid of a uniform, a mere look can make a grown man belt up”.
Next up, the fabulous food…
The chapter on catering is called ‘food’, but Mr Lovegrove actually spends only a little time covering the meals themselves. Instead he tells the story of how airlines design the menus and get the meals onto the plane.
I did not know that LSG Skychefs was started by Jim Marriott of the hotel group bearing his name. Apparently in 2011 they produced 492 million airline meals. A flight kitchen like any one of the 194 owned by LSG is a factory for food and with millions of meals to serve, every gram counts. Airline caterers are stringent about portion control.
The airlines sometimes use celebrity chefs to promote their services and their restaurants follow quite a different business model. When I was at Qatar Airways we brought in Nobu, Tom Aikens, Vineet Bhatia and Lebanon’s Chef Ramzi (pictured).
Their restaurants achieve a 200 to 300 per cent or more mark up so they can afford to be generous. However when 30,000 portions of Nobu’s black cod are required for business class flights, cost control is strict and there is no room to be cavalier with the portions.
Anton Mosimann is mentioned in the book. Famous for his jazzy bow ties and a private dining club in London’s fashionable Knightsbridge, I was told he had agreed in principle to work with Qatar Airways but it did not work out in the end as he decided to work on the London Olympics instead.
Funny story: In 2010 and 2011 Qatar Airways asked it’s business class passengers what they wanted and they said more luxury food. After evaluating a range of delicacies like caviar and quail’s eggs the management decided that foie gras was the way to go. Unfortunately, when it went on board hardly anybody touched it.
In a restaurant many people look at food through the prism of menu prices. They eat the foie gras and find it delicious. But when the delicacies are free, the same people decide that they do not like liver and it gets thrown away. I was told that Qatar Airways had to throw away rather a lot of foie gras in 2012.
Fortunately it did not all go to waste. The chefs kindly gave me quite a few tins which I happily devoured at home.
The best things that airlines can offer is comfort food. Indian currys do particularly well because they are heavy on sauce, so everything stays moist when it is reheated to 145 degrees. Because they are packed with spices, they still taste interesting when senses are dulled due to altitude.
Equipment really matters when it comes to catering too. It is entertaining to look at the pictures that Mr Lovegrove has assembled and see how often stewards are wielding sharp carving knives or pointy scissors for cutting grapes. These would not be allowed today.
KLM’s famous houses get a look in and it is surprising in a world of high fuel prices to see the heavy earthenware bowls and plates and more which Lufthansa loaded up in the 1960s. One Delta stewardess pictured in the 1930s is holding two smart Coke branded ice buckets that I would not mind having at home.
All the meals look amazing. But to be honest today’s airline glamour shots do too. Our product photographer at Qatar Airways explained to me some of the tricks that they do to get food looking great in the publicity images.
First of all, she let any cooked meat cool down before being assembled onto a plate to avoid vegetables and salads being damaged by the high temperatures of searing. Second, glazing with butter or sugar made things look shinier than they should be. Applying a soldering iron to cheese would make it melt in just the right places.
No matter how good the food looked in the early days of flight compared with what we experience today, I expect that the reality was quite different.
Mr Lovegrove finishes the chapter by neatly explaining how food and revenue go hand in hand:
“When boredom and discomfort set in, the chance to unpack the cutlery and sample the fare is a welcome distraction. Back on the ground, airline food is a popular subject among the recently disembarked clientele; if refreshments are poor the message gets passed on – a good enough reason to choose an alternative airline for the next trip. Conversely, if the food is appreciated then recommendations ensue.”
Third up, inspiring interiors
The interiors section is interesting for it’s focus on the old rather than the new. First class beds (see article), Q-Suites (see article), premium economy (see article and article) and more barely get a look in. These are so key to today’s airline industry that this is perhaps the book’s only downfall – for this reason I give it four and not five stars.
Mr Lovegrove explains that the first aircraft interiors were inspired by Pullman railway carriages with plenty of wood and gilt. I am not quite sure whether or not this tallies with what Bombardier once told me in a presentation, that interiors are inspired by yachts.
A good discussion of social spaces (see article) shows a Boeing concept called the Tiger lounge which was developed for but never installed in a 747’s hold, which would have created a three-deck passenger plane. It featured a window looking DOWN to the ground, which would no doubt have been awesome. Heading upstairs, there is a cool picture of a staircase that is neither spiral nor straight, but turning at a right angle after the first few steps.
This section seems slightly less detailed than the others. I suspect that this because airlines keep their interiors development programmes so secret that Mr Lovegrove had less luck either finding the people who designed them or getting them to comment. This is a real shame because interiors are perhaps the part of the airline that people experience for the longest amount of time.
For all the hours of discussion about revenue management, retailing, NDC and more when it comes to getting the customer experience right the most important thing is the seat.
I never fail to be surprised by how the seats which look great in photos are not that comfy in real life but seats which are maligned because they are not “big enough” can actually be extremely comfy. As the author says:
“Concorde’s personal space was restricted due to it’s relatively narrow fuselage. Factory’s [the design agency’s] task was to design the seats cleverly as opposed to simply making them bigger.”
Today’s airline designers should take note.
Last up, lovely liveries
The author starts with an uplifting story. He was flying at Christmas time in December 1966 and was delighted to see a Christmas tree painted on his plane’s tail. He realised as an adult that it was nothing unusual, just the standard cedar representing Middle Eastern Airways, the flag carrier of Lebanon which is famous for it’s cedars.
Aircraft liveries are powerful statements about an airline’s brand. They can be seen by travellers moving through airports even when flying someone else. Charismatic easyJet founder Stelios made a big thing of putting his airline’s phone number and later website on the side of his planes, figuring that taxi companies make a lot of money from this so why not airlines too.
There are some cracking liveries on display in the pictures. I loved Southwest’s 737 killer whales, promoting Sea World’s theme parks. They remind me a bit of Lani, Kai and Ka-La, the turtles featured on ANA’s A380 super jumbos (see article). The Japanese airline is shown with a fabulous 747 featuring Snoopy.
Air France’s Pepsi Concorde is on display at Dubai and I was delighted by Braniff’s almost-all-orange triple-engine 727s from1969. Imagine if Dutch KLM went for all-orange or Germany’s Lufthansa all-yellow. They would really stand out and I think they would be much more stylish (and generate much more revenue) than the rather staid corporate blue white livery the German flag carrier has today.
There is an interesting quote from Bobby Kooka, who conceived Air India’s famous Maharajah. Kooka said “he may look like royalty, but he is not royal”. Funnily enough, the Maharajah looks like Kooka, who was Air India’s commercial director at the time.
A design expert once pointed out to me that blue is the colour of indecision, the only colour that people can agree on. Many airlines do have blue in their livery. When Airbus kindly invited me to speak at a presentation for Chinese airlines during 2019 in Guiyang it was remarkable to see they almost all used red, which is lucky in China. Even Colourful Guizhou Airlines is mainly red and yellow. The green of Spring Airlines and blue of 9 Air really stood out.
The author concludes with the following remark, which could apply just as much to liveries as any other part of the airline business:
“In the middle there is the middle ground of the safe, reliable and tried-and-tested formula that appeals to the airline decision-makers and the anonymous, average customer. Unfortunately, due to timidity and market research, the lowest common denominator wins every time.”
Is your favourite airline ready to stand out from the crowd? Are they ready to avoid the middle ground? Imagine how amazing it would be if they were.
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