8 ms·

Remembering the Golden Age of Airline Food

68 points by prismatic 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
blitzar 3y ago
The golden age they refer to is a very brief period of time in a now long history of flight. From almost every possible perspective, flying domestically within the US has more in common with taking a bus than with international aviation.
Animats 3y ago
Air Hollywood, which is a film set rental company, offers the Pan Am Experience.[1] For about $300, you get to sit in a 747 cabin on the ground and have the experience of a Pan Am dinner from the 1960s. Even at the low end, air travel was impressive. PSA was a low-cost airline. SJC to LAX, every hour, for about $14, with a 59 minute flight time. The process was very simple. Drive up to terminal. Park. Walk up to cash register. Pay. The register receipt was the boarding pass. A 727 pulls up and lowers the rear stairs. People get off. After a few minutes, the person who ran the cash register leads everyone waiting out to the plane, and they climb the stairs. Stairs retract, and plane takes off. PSA stewardess graduation pictures from 1974.[2] [1] https://airhollywood.com/events/pan-am-experience/ https://airhollywood.com/events/pan-am-experience/ [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20090121124408/http://www.jetpsa.com/stewgrad/stewgrad/7404.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20090121124408/http://www.jetpsa...
- pluijzer 3y ago
  That boarding process seems so great. Right now literally prefer a 12 hour drive to a one hour flight. The whole process is exhausting and stressful.
  - q87b 3y ago
    It's probably better for our habitable ecosystem though so in a backwards way anything that makes plane travel less of a convenient no-brainer is good.
  - quacked 3y ago
    > prefer a 12 hour drive to a one hour flight I'm right there with you. I'd go as far as 14 hour drive before I start thinking I should fly instead. It wasn't always like this, flying was bearable even as far back as 2002-2008 even counting the post-9/11 stuff. I think a most of it has to do with cost-cutting. The second they find an efficiency they cut staff and hire cheaper workers. The whole culture around airports, even expensive ones, has started to resemble bus stations.
  - toadi 3y ago
    Exactly I live 600km from the capital. 1 hour flight. Still takes me more then half a day to get to my destination. I ride my motorcycle most of the times 6 hours door to door. With pit stops on the way. Trains are slow here but I take the sleep train. Get on train 10pm go to sleep and arrive at 5am in the morning :) I prefer these latter 2 over flying.
    - enos-ape 3y ago
      One more reason to just invest more in good high speed train infrastructure. https://www.chronotrains.com/?zoom=4.4&lng=4.85&lat=49.23&stationId=8700010 https://www.chronotrains.com/?zoom=4.4&lng=4.85&lat=49.23&st...
      - llampx 3y ago
        It would only take a couple of terrorist incidences on the train to make the experience as painful as flying already is.
        usrusr 3y ago
        Trains can be and have been blown up. But that's mostly harmless compared to the horrors that could be done to a fully occupied road tunnel with a few well coordinated trucks. Should we stop building roads? Planes are an exceptional target because they can be deviated to foreign countries or to dramatic impact sites and because are so isolated while in the air. Neither applies to trains.
        bombcar 3y ago
        Also perfect train security doesn't protect against something on the track, and you can't adequately protect thousands of miles of track. You can reduce, but not eliminate, the risk. A plane is a self-contained system and most people don't have access to surface-to-air missiles.
        pfannkuchen 3y ago
        Poland doesn’t have these problems, I wonder why?
  - aww_dang 3y ago
    I preferred the private Amtrak compartment. Overnight trip, bring your own snacks and beverage. Eat a meal or two with other people in the dining car. Read a book and be left alone in your room. Best part was being able to ride a bicycle right to the station and pack it my way. No luggage or boarding anxiety. Arrive and depart from the city or town center. After you pay the airline's extra luggage fees for a bicycle, the cost is comparable.
    - andrepd 3y ago
      Yep. Departing from, and arriving to, the city center rather than have to commute to and from the airport is definitely a killer feature.
  - nine_k 3y ago
    It's another reminder that terrorists have won, and have ruined the flight experience for everyone. You basically get searched in order to board. Nobody agrees to have even the slightest risk of a a plane to be hijacked in exchange of not having all of these security measures (which, in a significant part, are a security theater).
    - Nextgrid 3y ago
      Maybe the fear-mongerers have won instead? There are lots of public places/events that don't require any searches/background checks and where a bomb would yield a significant number of casualties and terror to blowing up a regional jet, yet we don't seem to be having explosions every other day. Maybe the terrorist threat is overblown and is merely kept around as a convenient excuse for more surveillance/repression?
      - hoseja 3y ago
        The terrorists were explicitly inducing the fearmonger response, no?
        sokoloff 3y ago
        Yes, but that doesn’t obligate us to indulge them.
        pfannkuchen 3y ago
        Yes and no? Terrorism is generally used against an enemy when actual military action is not possible. The intent would normally be to steer government action via basically public pressure. So the purpose is not the inconvenience or intrusiveness of counter terrorism precautions, that is just a side effect. Though most modern terrorism is likely a weird edge case rooted in an overly literal interpretation of a certain book which did not consider the case of a distant empire when it was designed, and therefore the terrorism has no logical game theoretic explanation (unlike, say, the IRA).
      - sokoloff 3y ago
        It’s a substantial jobs program as well, making it an additional amount sticky.
  - andrepd 3y ago
    That's a bit of an exaggeration isn't it. Yes there's bag scan, and yes you need to buy in advance not to have exorbitant prices. Apart from that the experience seems the same. And you shouldn't be taking 1h flights anywhere of course x)
- litoE 3y ago
  I remember flying PSA between Oakland and LAX in 1972. $16 each way and you could pay the flight attendant after boarding. The "meal" was a choice of "coffee, tea, punch or boullion".
- throwawaymaths 3y ago
  It probably actually tastes good too. Iirc, taste buds don't work so well at altitude so all that fancy food prep was wasted on the passengers of yore. Might be worth revisiting on the 787s though since those are pressurized to 1km? Or something
- lucas_membrane 3y ago
  > stewardess graduation pictures While PSA operated within a single state, there were no training requirements for its flight attendants. They were recruited by a lucky fellow who walked up and down the beach on weekends making offers. The recruits could be working on actual flights as soon as the following Monday. The airline had a discount flight from LA to SF around midnight on Friday night that was a couple of dollars less than the standard fare you mention. And the passengers on that flight could fly assured that the flight attendants had a week's experience.
tsu_tsu 3y ago
"I member" as Southpark would put it. But seriously, not really shedding tears here. It was nice as long as it lasted, but packing your own food isn't that big of deal, imo.
- gherkinnn 3y ago
  Packaging it is fine. Having a clown at security steal my cheese because it is deemed a liquid and therefor a bomb is where the difficulty lies.
leoedin 3y ago
When comparing "flying then" to "flying now", you need to look at the real cost of the flights. Yes, the experience in economy class has got worse, but the cost of the ticket has also significantly dropped. In 2021 dollars, the cost of a round trip air fare has basically halved since 1979. You could buy a business class ticket now for a comparable price to economy back then. https://www.airlines.org/dataset/annual-round-trip-fares-and-fees-domestic/ https://www.airlines.org/dataset/annual-round-trip-fares-and... https://www.travelandleisure.com/airlines-airports/history-of-flight-costs https://www.travelandleisure.com/airlines-airports/history-o...
- rightbyte 3y ago
  > round trip air fare has basically halved since 1979 I don't think that number will hold up if you include square feet of personal space and lbs of luggage that might need extra fees.
  - notahacker 3y ago
    The airlines.org figures includes a column with bags and fees. More or less halved in real terms since 1990. You might have lost an inch or two of legroom. Then again, you might not because they made the seats skinnier...
    - rightbyte 3y ago
      Ye well I agree that it has become cheaper to fly. I just don't think it is a 1:1 between the ticket price tag change and the value for me change.
  - johnnymorgan 3y ago
    Or factor in the loss of purchasing power, along with the shrinkflation. I love when people adjust for inflation in these debates but don't factor in purchasing power of the dollar comparison. The ticket price is more expensive now, than 1979.
    - 3y ago
freddie_mercury 3y ago
These kind of articles are always dumb and never make an apples to apples comparison. It talks about Pan Am in the 1950s. In May 1952 Pan Am tickets for New York - London roundtrip in economy class were $486. And that was the minimum legal price. Presumably you could find yourself paying more depending on demand. That's equivalent to $5,584 today. Google Flights tells me I can get a first class ticket on that route for $4,700 today. So you're paying almost $1,000 more than a modern first class ticket and wondering why the food is pretty okay.
- WeylandYutani 3y ago
  Flying was for the rich until the 1970s. The name "Airbus" describes it perfectly.
  - somedude895 3y ago
    And yet the article says the reason is basically "capitalism bad": > you had airline deregulation by a guy who was an acolyte of Ronald Reagan. > The more horrible you make it to fly coach, the more business people will demand to fly business and first class. The airlines make a bucket of money off people traveling up front, which is why they make coach as oppressive as possible. Yeah no, deregulation made it so the average person could travel by plane at all.
    - caseyohara 3y ago
      Recently there was a great episode on the Freakonomics podcast, actually the final episode in a three part series on airline economics. It talks about the history of airline price regulation and the related economics. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-your-plane-ticket-too-expensive-or-too-cheap/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-your-plane-ticket-too-ex... > Back when the industry was regulated by the Civil Aeronautics Board, or C.A.B., airlines were not allowed to lower prices to win customers. So they had to find other ways to compete. > They would compete against each other by adding more flights on the route. Since you couldn’t cut the price, what you would do is say, “We have the most flights.” And that really mattered to business travelers who wanted to be able to, if their meeting ended early, to go to the airport and quickly catch a flight home. So they were competing on frequency, and in other ways in service quality, by offering piano lounges on 747s. And they were gradually driving down the share of seats that were filled by adding more and more flights. And they would eventually get back to the point that they weren’t earning a great rate of return on their investment. So they’d go back to the C.A.B. and they’d say, “We need higher fares.” And the C.A.B. would say, “Yeah, okay, we’ll give you higher fares.” Eventually, in the mid-1970s, people at the C.A.B. figured out that this was just an endless loop, where we were raising fares, and the planes were getting more and more empty, and this was very inefficient. That’s where we had gotten to — pretty empty planes with very high prices.
shapefrog 3y ago
NY to LA is ~ 5 hours, which is about as long as you get on the continental USA. Do you really need to eat? Chicago to NY is just over 2 hours - not really enough time for a 3 course meal. If you are doing the 19 hours from NY to Singapore ... the food is pretty good!
- CrampusDestrus 3y ago
  People who have planned the trip might no need to eat on the plane, but business clients who might have a tight schedule or hopped onto the flight last minute certainly need the onboard dining
fakedang 3y ago
[flagged]
te_chris 3y ago
Recently did London to Auckland (via SF) with United and selected 'Asian Vegetarian' as my meal. Best decision I've ever made travelling long haul: curry wins hands down over bad pasta or the grim 'chicken or fish' options.
rjh29 3y ago
The Asian airlines I've used (JAL, ANA, Singapore, AirAsia) have been pretty damn good. It's hard to mess up curry and rice; you get salad, side dishes, bread, ice cream and alcohol. Many of the dishes are designed by famous chefs, even in economy.
- omnibrain 3y ago
  Thai was great too. And even the small regional Airline we had for the hop from USM to BKK catered something delicious. (Noodles with prawns)
- smcl 3y ago
  I had a fine time on JAL, theyve come a long way since being responsible for one of the more infamous food/air incidents - the poop plane: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Air_Lines_food_poisoning_incident https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Air_Lines_food_poisoni...
  - rjh29 3y ago
    Wow, thanks for that. So much to unpack here! 1) 200 people with diarrhea and vomiting. Can't imagine how the plane smelled. 2) JAL's catering manager committed suicide after hearing about this. 3) If the pilots had eaten the food the plane may not have even landed safely - at the time pilots did not eat different meals to the passengers, but this is now commonplace. 4) Ultimate cause was actually American - Alaskan cooks in Anchorage prepared the food, and one had infected blisters on his hand. 5) Could have been prevented if the food wasn't stored at room temperature for 6 and then 8 hours. Matches my experience with Japanese people who have no problem leaving cooked food out in supermarkets all day long, or leaving leftovers overnight at room temperature without chilling it, very different to the US or UK.
  - mikestew 3y ago
    Ah, yes, the inspiration for the 1980 documentary Airplane!, with Leslie Nielson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airplane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airplane!
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
D13Fd 3y ago
It looks nice, but personally, I'm ok with the change. I'd rather pay (much) less and not get the fancy food on a flight I'm probably going to sleep through anyway. And, as the article says, the current first class experience still offers an upgrade.
scionthefly 3y ago
When it's an option, fly Lufthansa. At least in their transatlantic flights, the food was excellent even though I was in cramped economy class. As I recall I had a type of beef stew, potatoes and carrots, salad, bread rolls, butter, and a nice ice cream for dessert. On domestic flights, I miss Southwest Airlines pre-9/11 snack packs. They had cheese, crackers, cookies, and fruit like apple sauce. Nice pick-me-up in the middle of a three hour flight.
- kaudinya 3y ago
  It of course also most likely depends on what kind of food do you like. Imho, Lufthansa food is better than UA or some other equivalent US airliners, but lags significantly behind Qatar airways, Emirates, Thai or even Turkish Airlines.
sbbr 3y ago
I can live without food and flight entertainment if they fly me Europe to US for 400 euro or Europe to Japan for 600.
didntknowya 3y ago
back in the day i saw an airline ad about how their chefs specially plans each meal and the flavors etc and how much research goes into it (like adding more salt because our taste-buds are less sensitive at high altitude). I now know it is BS because bringing takeaway on the plane I felt it taste the same if not better than any airline food I've had.

68 points by prismatic 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

The golden age they refer to is a very brief period of time in a now long history of flight. From almost every possible perspective, flying domestically within the US has more in common with taking a bus than with international aviation.

Animats 3y ago

Air Hollywood, which is a film set rental company, offers the Pan Am Experience.[1] For about $300, you get to sit in a 747 cabin on the ground and have the experience of a Pan Am dinner from the 1960s. Even at the low end, air travel was impressive. PSA was a low-cost airline. SJC to LAX, every hour, for about $14, with a 59 minute flight time. The process was very simple. Drive up to terminal. Park. Walk up to cash register. Pay. The register receipt was the boarding pass. A 727 pulls up and lowers the rear stairs. People get off. After a few minutes, the person who ran the cash register leads everyone waiting out to the plane, and they climb the stairs. Stairs retract, and plane takes off. PSA stewardess graduation pictures from 1974.[2] [1] https://airhollywood.com/events/pan-am-experience/ https://airhollywood.com/events/pan-am-experience/ [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20090121124408/http://www.jetpsa.com/stewgrad/stewgrad/7404.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20090121124408/http://www.jetpsa...

pluijzer 3y ago
That boarding process seems so great. Right now literally prefer a 12 hour drive to a one hour flight. The whole process is exhausting and stressful.
- q87b 3y ago
  It's probably better for our habitable ecosystem though so in a backwards way anything that makes plane travel less of a convenient no-brainer is good.
- quacked 3y ago
  > prefer a 12 hour drive to a one hour flight I'm right there with you. I'd go as far as 14 hour drive before I start thinking I should fly instead. It wasn't always like this, flying was bearable even as far back as 2002-2008 even counting the post-9/11 stuff. I think a most of it has to do with cost-cutting. The second they find an efficiency they cut staff and hire cheaper workers. The whole culture around airports, even expensive ones, has started to resemble bus stations.
- toadi 3y ago
  Exactly I live 600km from the capital. 1 hour flight. Still takes me more then half a day to get to my destination. I ride my motorcycle most of the times 6 hours door to door. With pit stops on the way. Trains are slow here but I take the sleep train. Get on train 10pm go to sleep and arrive at 5am in the morning :) I prefer these latter 2 over flying.
  - enos-ape 3y ago
    One more reason to just invest more in good high speed train infrastructure. https://www.chronotrains.com/?zoom=4.4&lng=4.85&lat=49.23&stationId=8700010 https://www.chronotrains.com/?zoom=4.4&lng=4.85&lat=49.23&st...
    - llampx 3y ago
      It would only take a couple of terrorist incidences on the train to make the experience as painful as flying already is.
      - usrusr 3y ago
        Trains can be and have been blown up. But that's mostly harmless compared to the horrors that could be done to a fully occupied road tunnel with a few well coordinated trucks. Should we stop building roads? Planes are an exceptional target because they can be deviated to foreign countries or to dramatic impact sites and because are so isolated while in the air. Neither applies to trains.
        bombcar 3y ago
        Also perfect train security doesn't protect against something on the track, and you can't adequately protect thousands of miles of track. You can reduce, but not eliminate, the risk. A plane is a self-contained system and most people don't have access to surface-to-air missiles.
      - pfannkuchen 3y ago
        Poland doesn’t have these problems, I wonder why?
- aww_dang 3y ago
  I preferred the private Amtrak compartment. Overnight trip, bring your own snacks and beverage. Eat a meal or two with other people in the dining car. Read a book and be left alone in your room. Best part was being able to ride a bicycle right to the station and pack it my way. No luggage or boarding anxiety. Arrive and depart from the city or town center. After you pay the airline's extra luggage fees for a bicycle, the cost is comparable.
  - andrepd 3y ago
    Yep. Departing from, and arriving to, the city center rather than have to commute to and from the airport is definitely a killer feature.
- nine_k 3y ago
  It's another reminder that terrorists have won, and have ruined the flight experience for everyone. You basically get searched in order to board. Nobody agrees to have even the slightest risk of a a plane to be hijacked in exchange of not having all of these security measures (which, in a significant part, are a security theater).
  - Nextgrid 3y ago
    Maybe the fear-mongerers have won instead? There are lots of public places/events that don't require any searches/background checks and where a bomb would yield a significant number of casualties and terror to blowing up a regional jet, yet we don't seem to be having explosions every other day. Maybe the terrorist threat is overblown and is merely kept around as a convenient excuse for more surveillance/repression?
    - hoseja 3y ago
      The terrorists were explicitly inducing the fearmonger response, no?
      - sokoloff 3y ago
        Yes, but that doesn’t obligate us to indulge them.
      - pfannkuchen 3y ago
        Yes and no? Terrorism is generally used against an enemy when actual military action is not possible. The intent would normally be to steer government action via basically public pressure. So the purpose is not the inconvenience or intrusiveness of counter terrorism precautions, that is just a side effect. Though most modern terrorism is likely a weird edge case rooted in an overly literal interpretation of a certain book which did not consider the case of a distant empire when it was designed, and therefore the terrorism has no logical game theoretic explanation (unlike, say, the IRA).
    - sokoloff 3y ago
      It’s a substantial jobs program as well, making it an additional amount sticky.
- andrepd 3y ago
  That's a bit of an exaggeration isn't it. Yes there's bag scan, and yes you need to buy in advance not to have exorbitant prices. Apart from that the experience seems the same. And you shouldn't be taking 1h flights anywhere of course x)
litoE 3y ago
I remember flying PSA between Oakland and LAX in 1972. $16 each way and you could pay the flight attendant after boarding. The "meal" was a choice of "coffee, tea, punch or boullion".
throwawaymaths 3y ago
It probably actually tastes good too. Iirc, taste buds don't work so well at altitude so all that fancy food prep was wasted on the passengers of yore. Might be worth revisiting on the 787s though since those are pressurized to 1km? Or something
lucas_membrane 3y ago
> stewardess graduation pictures While PSA operated within a single state, there were no training requirements for its flight attendants. They were recruited by a lucky fellow who walked up and down the beach on weekends making offers. The recruits could be working on actual flights as soon as the following Monday. The airline had a discount flight from LA to SF around midnight on Friday night that was a couple of dollars less than the standard fare you mention. And the passengers on that flight could fly assured that the flight attendants had a week's experience.

tsu_tsu 3y ago

"I member" as Southpark would put it. But seriously, not really shedding tears here. It was nice as long as it lasted, but packing your own food isn't that big of deal, imo.

gherkinnn 3y ago
Packaging it is fine. Having a clown at security steal my cheese because it is deemed a liquid and therefor a bomb is where the difficulty lies.

leoedin 3y ago

When comparing "flying then" to "flying now", you need to look at the real cost of the flights. Yes, the experience in economy class has got worse, but the cost of the ticket has also significantly dropped. In 2021 dollars, the cost of a round trip air fare has basically halved since 1979. You could buy a business class ticket now for a comparable price to economy back then. https://www.airlines.org/dataset/annual-round-trip-fares-and-fees-domestic/ https://www.airlines.org/dataset/annual-round-trip-fares-and... https://www.travelandleisure.com/airlines-airports/history-of-flight-costs https://www.travelandleisure.com/airlines-airports/history-o...

rightbyte 3y ago
> round trip air fare has basically halved since 1979 I don't think that number will hold up if you include square feet of personal space and lbs of luggage that might need extra fees.
- notahacker 3y ago
  The airlines.org figures includes a column with bags and fees. More or less halved in real terms since 1990. You might have lost an inch or two of legroom. Then again, you might not because they made the seats skinnier...
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    Ye well I agree that it has become cheaper to fly. I just don't think it is a 1:1 between the ticket price tag change and the value for me change.
- johnnymorgan 3y ago
  Or factor in the loss of purchasing power, along with the shrinkflation. I love when people adjust for inflation in these debates but don't factor in purchasing power of the dollar comparison. The ticket price is more expensive now, than 1979.
  - 3y ago

freddie_mercury 3y ago

These kind of articles are always dumb and never make an apples to apples comparison. It talks about Pan Am in the 1950s. In May 1952 Pan Am tickets for New York - London roundtrip in economy class were $486. And that was the minimum legal price. Presumably you could find yourself paying more depending on demand. That's equivalent to $5,584 today. Google Flights tells me I can get a first class ticket on that route for $4,700 today. So you're paying almost $1,000 more than a modern first class ticket and wondering why the food is pretty okay.

WeylandYutani 3y ago
Flying was for the rich until the 1970s. The name "Airbus" describes it perfectly.
- somedude895 3y ago
  And yet the article says the reason is basically "capitalism bad": > you had airline deregulation by a guy who was an acolyte of Ronald Reagan. > The more horrible you make it to fly coach, the more business people will demand to fly business and first class. The airlines make a bucket of money off people traveling up front, which is why they make coach as oppressive as possible. Yeah no, deregulation made it so the average person could travel by plane at all.
  - caseyohara 3y ago
    Recently there was a great episode on the Freakonomics podcast, actually the final episode in a three part series on airline economics. It talks about the history of airline price regulation and the related economics. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-your-plane-ticket-too-expensive-or-too-cheap/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-your-plane-ticket-too-ex... > Back when the industry was regulated by the Civil Aeronautics Board, or C.A.B., airlines were not allowed to lower prices to win customers. So they had to find other ways to compete. > They would compete against each other by adding more flights on the route. Since you couldn’t cut the price, what you would do is say, “We have the most flights.” And that really mattered to business travelers who wanted to be able to, if their meeting ended early, to go to the airport and quickly catch a flight home. So they were competing on frequency, and in other ways in service quality, by offering piano lounges on 747s. And they were gradually driving down the share of seats that were filled by adding more and more flights. And they would eventually get back to the point that they weren’t earning a great rate of return on their investment. So they’d go back to the C.A.B. and they’d say, “We need higher fares.” And the C.A.B. would say, “Yeah, okay, we’ll give you higher fares.” Eventually, in the mid-1970s, people at the C.A.B. figured out that this was just an endless loop, where we were raising fares, and the planes were getting more and more empty, and this was very inefficient. That’s where we had gotten to — pretty empty planes with very high prices.

shapefrog 3y ago

NY to LA is ~ 5 hours, which is about as long as you get on the continental USA. Do you really need to eat? Chicago to NY is just over 2 hours - not really enough time for a 3 course meal. If you are doing the 19 hours from NY to Singapore ... the food is pretty good!

CrampusDestrus 3y ago
People who have planned the trip might no need to eat on the plane, but business clients who might have a tight schedule or hopped onto the flight last minute certainly need the onboard dining

fakedang 3y ago

[flagged]

te_chris 3y ago

Recently did London to Auckland (via SF) with United and selected 'Asian Vegetarian' as my meal. Best decision I've ever made travelling long haul: curry wins hands down over bad pasta or the grim 'chicken or fish' options.

rjh29 3y ago

The Asian airlines I've used (JAL, ANA, Singapore, AirAsia) have been pretty damn good. It's hard to mess up curry and rice; you get salad, side dishes, bread, ice cream and alcohol. Many of the dishes are designed by famous chefs, even in economy.

omnibrain 3y ago
Thai was great too. And even the small regional Airline we had for the hop from USM to BKK catered something delicious. (Noodles with prawns)
smcl 3y ago
I had a fine time on JAL, theyve come a long way since being responsible for one of the more infamous food/air incidents - the poop plane: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Air_Lines_food_poisoning_incident https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Air_Lines_food_poisoni...
- rjh29 3y ago
  Wow, thanks for that. So much to unpack here! 1) 200 people with diarrhea and vomiting. Can't imagine how the plane smelled. 2) JAL's catering manager committed suicide after hearing about this. 3) If the pilots had eaten the food the plane may not have even landed safely - at the time pilots did not eat different meals to the passengers, but this is now commonplace. 4) Ultimate cause was actually American - Alaskan cooks in Anchorage prepared the food, and one had infected blisters on his hand. 5) Could have been prevented if the food wasn't stored at room temperature for 6 and then 8 hours. Matches my experience with Japanese people who have no problem leaving cooked food out in supermarkets all day long, or leaving leftovers overnight at room temperature without chilling it, very different to the US or UK.
- mikestew 3y ago
  Ah, yes, the inspiration for the 1980 documentary Airplane!, with Leslie Nielson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airplane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airplane!

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]

D13Fd 3y ago

It looks nice, but personally, I'm ok with the change. I'd rather pay (much) less and not get the fancy food on a flight I'm probably going to sleep through anyway. And, as the article says, the current first class experience still offers an upgrade.

scionthefly 3y ago

When it's an option, fly Lufthansa. At least in their transatlantic flights, the food was excellent even though I was in cramped economy class. As I recall I had a type of beef stew, potatoes and carrots, salad, bread rolls, butter, and a nice ice cream for dessert. On domestic flights, I miss Southwest Airlines pre-9/11 snack packs. They had cheese, crackers, cookies, and fruit like apple sauce. Nice pick-me-up in the middle of a three hour flight.

kaudinya 3y ago
It of course also most likely depends on what kind of food do you like. Imho, Lufthansa food is better than UA or some other equivalent US airliners, but lags significantly behind Qatar airways, Emirates, Thai or even Turkish Airlines.

sbbr 3y ago

I can live without food and flight entertainment if they fly me Europe to US for 400 euro or Europe to Japan for 600.

didntknowya 3y ago

back in the day i saw an airline ad about how their chefs specially plans each meal and the flavors etc and how much research goes into it (like adding more salt because our taste-buds are less sensitive at high altitude). I now know it is BS because bringing takeaway on the plane I felt it taste the same if not better than any airline food I've had.