Reading in-flight magazines always felt an odd thing to do. I always leafed through them and took comfort in the half-filled cross-word puzzles. It was proof there were other people like me who read these publications, whatever their reasons. I liked being able to escape into something very bounded to the trip and yet informative in odd ways - some ad for a jewelry store in Hawaii, a story about a guy who had taken his grandfather's dying oyster business international, the most unique candy from a country I have never been to, interviews with people who had traveled to challenging destinations and so on. All of the reading was meant to inspire thoughts about what adventures await if someone just buys a ticket to a place they have never been to. The reason for this publication's demise are complex:
But even as they have been selling up, on the whole, they’ve slimmed down. Carpenter told me how, in the course of her tenure, in-flight magazines began to be printed on thinner paper. “It was really annoying when you have great photographers,” she said. The situation was one of cost-benefit analysis, as well as environmental concerns. Weight on a plane translates to fuel, which translates to money. That’s not a new consideration: back in the eighties, Robert Crandall, the CEO of American Airlines, mandated the removal of a single olive from each dinner salad served to fliers, saving the airline forty thousand dollars per year. Not every airline was as parsimonious, however: it took until 2012 for Alaska Airlines to stop handing out prayer cards with the meal service. What flies away in time, and what sticks around—these are decisions not so easily explained by earthly logic.
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