The in-flight magazine is dead, and flying will never be the same

Page through the January 1991 issue of American Way magazine, and you can follow in the footsteps of the Impressionists as they painted their way along the Côte d’Azur. Or race across the Costa Rican isthmus in a day – on foot and by train.

American Way, the former in-flight magazine of American Airlines, was at its zenith, reaching more than 73 million people on planes alone in 1990. The publication strove to be more than just an advertisement for the carrier’s destinations. It had the budget and reach to be a magazine that travelers actually wanted to read.

“It really was a golden age,” said Doug Crichton, who edited American Way from 1988 to 1993. “The airline just said, ‘Do whatever you want.’ … Our goal was to make it a New Yorker of the sky.”

Those days are gone. The march of technology, from personal in-flight entertainment to high-speed free Wi-Fi at 35,000 feet, combined with our societal shift en masse to digital platforms, has rendered in-flight magazines obsolete. Oh, and a pandemic turned all of us into germaphobes leery of anything anyone else might have touched.

American Airlines published the last issue of American Way in June 2021. United Airlines ended the 32-year print run of its Hemispheres magazine in September; the airline has previewed an online version of Hemispheres that it plans to expand.

That leaves only one smaller domestic carrier, Hawaiian Airlines, with a print magazine to its name. But Hana Hou! may be on its last legs, too, after Hawaiian’s recent takeover by Alaska Airlines, which discontinued its own magazine in March 2020. A spokesperson for Alaska said the airline would “evaluate” the future of Hana Hou! as part of the integration with Hawaiian.

“The whole point was keeping you distracted while flying, because you’re sitting in a seat for multiple hours,” said Bob van der Linden, a curator of air transportation at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington. “There are more sophisticated ways now, and that’s where they’re going to. And it’s a way to save money.”

From distractions to literature

Airlines began publishing in-flight magazines in the 1960s as a marketing tool.

The cover of the October 1975 issue of Pan Am’s Clipper in-flight magazine highlighted features on Kenya – with opening lines from the famous memoir “Out of Africa,” no less – New Zealand and Rio de Janeiro, all of which happened to be Pan Am destinations at the time.

In-flight magazines’ promotional slant gave way to more ambitious and diverse content in the late 1980s and 1990s. Airlines were willing to splash out on their magazines to woo lucrative business travelers. This was the golden age of the genre.

American Way’s reporting rates, which ran to as much as $2,500 for a feature, attracted top-notch writers. So did the ability to offer them a free flight, Crichton said.

American Way published two fiction pieces by Ray Bradbury, the author of “Fahrenheit 451,” in 1993. Crichton was particularly proud of those, along with pieces that touched on such hard-news topics as political unrest in Latin America, a major market for American.

The fiction series “Row 22 Seats A&B” ran semi-regularly in Hemispheres from 1997 through 2009. Written by Frederick Waterman, the series featured stories about two passengers who sat in the titular seats. Topics ranged from romances to spy thrillers. And the series proved popular; Waterman said he received more than a thousand letters from readers over the years. The stories were even published as a book in 2002.

“That particular column I am very, very proud of, because it had a very specific, elegant airline angle to it,” said Randy Johnson, editor of Hemispheres from 1996 through 2009. “It was Hemispheres at its best.”

‘Bastion’ of print journalism

In-flight magazines, for all their prominent writers and engaging fiction, were travel magazines at their core. September’s final issue of Hemispheres highlighted United’s hometown of Chicago in its flagship monthly feature, “Three Perfect Days.”

“The airline magazines were really still that bastion of great print journalism where they would say we’re going to send you to Spain, we’re going to send you to Mexico,” said Jenny Adams, a freelance journalist based in New Orleans who wrote for American Way, Hemispheres and other in-flight magazines.

Adams estimated that during the past decade she wrote around 65 stories for in-flight magazines, including a profile of the actress Ana de Armas for American’s Spanish-language magazine, Nexos, and “Three Perfect Days” installments on Málaga, Spain, and Nashville.

“Three Perfect Days” debuted in the magazine’s inaugural October 1992 issue with a curated itinerary for Paris. The series proved popular, enduring United’s ups and downs.

“The long weekend was becoming a thing at that period of time,” said Johnson, who, in addition to editing Hemispheres, helped launch the magazine in 1992. “We were maintaining that, yes, you could get a perfect introduction to a city in three days on a long weekend.”

The magazine paid well for its flagship feature. Writers could earn $1-2 per word “depending on the experience and stature of the writer,” Johnson said of his tenure. Adams said Hemispheres paid her around $3,000, or a $1 a word, for a “Three Perfect Days” feature, plus more for photos, as recently as March, when she profiled Málaga.

“A digital experience allows us to make Hemispheres even better – we can reach a wider audience, offer more personalized content and tell richer stories,” Remy Milburn, a spokesperson for United, wrote in an email. The soon-to-come digital edition, Milburn added, will include “Three Perfect Days” and translations in eight languages.

Ad revenue for the magazine was stable, but United “wanted to move to a digital form of storytelling,” said Ellen Carpenter, the editor of Hemispheres from 2017 through its last issue.

What will she miss now that Hemispheres is gone? “It united people on any flight, because everyone’s reading the same thing, engaging with the same stories [and] the same photos,” Carpenter said, lamenting our societal shift to siloed, personal entertainment.

American said in a 2021 press release that it decided to stop printing American Way in deference to free digital in-flight entertainment and to “eliminate some paper waste and reduce weight on our aircraft.”

Sources of wanderlust

For all the thrilling fiction and curated destination coverage that in-flight magazines offered, it’s the airline maps in the back that some will miss most.

They were a staple in nearly every in-flight magazine over the years – and a bigger airline often meant a bigger map, with some a multipage foldout emblematic of the carrier’s global reach.

“When I was a kid, way before phones and seat-back entertainment, I’d grab that magazine and be transported into another world,” said Lane Terrell, a frequent flier who lives in the Dallas area. “It was my window to the world outside of my sleepy mountain town and cemented my passion for flying and traveling.”

Terrell often would rip out the maps, tape them to the wall of his childhood bedroom and imagine all the places airplanes could take him.

Airlines have largely replaced static, printed maps with digital offerings. Seat-back screens show live flight maps, and websites offer a digital destination spread that shows curated flight offerings based on one’s point of departure.

“It’s hard now when you’re on your phone. You don’t have that same connection. It’s not tactile. You’re not, like, excited to go fly somewhere,” Adams said. “I’m just gutted that that’s all gone.”