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There were, of course, other ways to feel connected with humanity on a plane. You could notice a slight indentation left in the seat from the person before you, or the length to which they had extended (or shortened) their seatbelt, which would now become yours. You didn’t have to turn to the back of the in-flight magazine to see some stranger’s—or, more likely, strangers’—handiwork on the crossword, or wonder what flavor of sticky substance someone had spilled across its pages. Nor was it required to retrace the doodles drawn on the ads for UNTUCKit shirts, It’s Just Lunch, Hard Rock Café, Wellendorff jewelry, companies selling gold coins, and Big Green Eggs. But it’s clear that with the last print issue of Hemispheres, the in-flight magazine of United Airlines, and the last such magazine connected to a major US carrier (with the exception of Hana Hou!, for Hawaiian Airlines), it is the end of an era.
The final edition was published in September. Most of the magazine’s thirty-two-year-long archives have disappeared. (Per United, the Hemispheres website will make available “select content” from the past.) The idea now, spokesperson Remy Milburn wrote, is that “a digital experience allows us to make Hemispheres even better—we can reach a wider audience, offer more personalized content, and tell richer stories. Plus, digital functionality includes screen reading and enlarged text, with translations into eight languages coming soon.” Now boarding on United, according to a press release, will be Kinective Media, “the first media network that uses insights from travel behaviors to connect customers to personalized, real-time advertising, content, experiences, and offers from leading brands.” To advertisers, Kinective promises to be “your ticket to curated audiences with hours of attention to give and money to spend. Never before have brands been able to connect directly with a US-based traveler audience at this scale.” That includes “fliers who prefer the front or back of the plane,” among other metrics.
Ellen Carpenter, until recently the editor in chief of Hemispheres, told me that the magazine had had a reach of twelve to fifteen million people per month. She worked there for seven years, until her job ended with the shuttering of print. “As the internet grows and grows, it’s harder and harder to find curated content,” she said. But with Hemispheres, “it’s there in one package, you can digest it all. It’s someone taking the thought out of it for you.” She compared the experience of in-flight reading to paging through People magazine at the dentist’s office, though People has a monthly paid subscription of 2.5 million. Costco Connection feels closer to Hemispheres, maybe, with fifteen million paid subscribers per month. Of course, these are different metrics, in a way, the breadth of a subscriber base of a members-only supermarket chain versus the sheer number of “butts in seats,” as Carpenter described them, the not-exactly-subscribing-but-still-paying-to-be-there people who travel via airplane.
Hemispheres, along with easyJet’s Traveller, Eurowings’ Wings, Virgin Atlantic’s Vera, Jetstar Airways’ What’s Next?, and many more in-flight magazines over the years, has been produced by one company: Ink Global. Ink, which began in 1994 with a startup airline that operated a single route between London and Beirut, planned to “disrupt the entire business model” of in-flight magazines, which until that point were usually produced by airlines themselves or inside of large agencies. Part of the appeal: at the start, Ink’s magazines were provided for free. “Later it became a revenue stream to airlines, especially when airlines opened up their other media channels for Ink to monetize,” Jonny Clark, the managing director of Ink Studio (Ink’s creative arm), told me. “Unlike most newsstand publications, in-flight magazines had a readership that was rapidly growing. The larger the travel industry became, the more airlines, the more seats, and, naturally, the more readers these magazines benefited from.” Notably, Clark told me, Ink never recycled material, since “one airline’s view of the world is different from another.”
In discussions about the form, the idea of a “captive audience” comes up repeatedly—or, as a master’s thesis I found from 1972 put it, airplane magazines exist in a “laboratory situation” in the sky. “Minds are conceivably unoccupied and their bodies captivated by a plush foam-covered rubber,” the student wrote. “Is the in-flight magazine received by its audience as an appealing, high-quality, well-written publication or is it perceived as ‘just another handout behind the airsick bag’?” Digitization presents a troublesome new variable. “If you are thinking about whether people are going to read any of these stories online, I think in a sense you’ve already lost,” Alex Hoyt, previously a senior editor at Rhapsody, one of United’s magazines, told me. (Hoyt also worked as the editor in chief of The National, Amtrak’s in-train magazine, another Ink Global production, which lived for three years.) “If people have good Wi-Fi, they’re going to read the New York Times or whatever,” he said. “The case for these magazines is the case for print in general. Is there a place for print in this world? Probably. But it has to have great photography with terrific long-form storytelling.”
Put a different way, the lure of print, now, might present itself only inside of constraint—and the constraint of no Wi-Fi is rapidly disappearing. It was in a Wi-Fi void, inside of a highfalutin, high-altitude tin can, that the in-flight magazine once thrived, both opulent and casual, an object of simultaneous aspiration and reassurance. Its cousin Skymall understood these brief, buoyant contradictions acutely, offering, via its contracts with the airlines that stocked it, an array of smart idiosyncrasies, luxurious gags whose appeal also seemed, maybe, specific to the temporary whims of air travel: Harry Potter wands, Easter Island doorstops, personal sauna systems, mittens for two, toasters that would burn the silhouette of your dog’s head into a slice of bread. These were not necessities, in the same way that in-flight magazines never pretended to offer breaking news or timely political analysis.
“Many magazines have—or had!—elite audiences, or want to tell their advertisers that,” Randy Johnson, a founding senior editor of Hemispheres, told me. “But there’s no doubt that when ‘a frequent flier is your frequent reader’ you can argue that your audience has a level of affluence, education, and sophistication that’s pretty rare, not to mention a global mix of that demographic. There are a lot of folks on airplanes, especially now, but the really frequent flier still shares those traits with the early adopter of air travel way back in the romantic early days—hence a product for them.” As Jordan Heller, previously the editor in chief of Rhapsody, put it, “What we got out of it were two million eyeballs a month, or something, and we’d sell advertising off of those eyeballs. What United Airlines got was a bonus for their customers, something to entertain them. And to inspire them to travel more, which means buying more plane tickets.”
Perhaps where terrestrial reality sat suspended, magazines were deeply powerful objects—far more so than the ubiquitous jokes about them seemed to indicate. There was The Office’s Michael Scott, a fan of American Way: “They did this great profile last month of Doris Roberts and where she likes to eat when she’s in Phoenix. Illuminating.” And the nickname given to The New Republic, in the nineties—“the in-flight magazine of Air Force One”—originally a jab, but also a nod to its influence. In January of 2020, Australian researchers wrote, rather ominously, in the journal Travel Medicine and Infectious Disease, that in-flight magazines were “an underutilized source of information regarding infection control and measures to prevent the spread of infectious diseases.” (It’s ironic that, in fact, in-flight magazines were removed from planes early in the COVID-19 pandemic because of FAA fears that the virus spread via surfaces. By the time copies were returned, Clark said, “the damage had been done to the content ecosystem.”) In management circles, the term “Airline Magazine Syndrome” describes a CEO’s enthusiasm for shoddy solutions promising corporate rejuvenation, notoriously encountered while paging through in-flight prose. The idea seems to be that these high-atmosphere magazines possess powers of persuasion that on-the-ground reading material lacks.
It is no wonder that people seem to have deep relationships to airplane magazines. A friend recalled a long flight on Singapore Airlines during which attendants brought out a birthday present for her sister—a watch with a plane for its second hand—chosen from the in-flight magazine and accessed via inventory held on board. On the editorial side of things, many writers and editors I spoke with recalled with great fondness a particular combination of ample budget and creative freedom: “We could fly our writers for free,” Heller said. “The first thing we thought was, Where can we go, where can we travel? We’d look at the United map and have that inspire ideas. There was one place United went to in Africa, which was Lagos.” That resulted in a detailed profile of Nollywood.
Carpenter emphasized the idea of the airline magazine reaching everyone possible. An in-flight magazine is “for you, it’s for your mother, and it’s for your daughter,” she said. “Everyone has to be able to read it. It crosses generations with its appeal. Most people are aware the audience is broad.” So: the opposite type of product, really, from the personalized digital content tooled and retooled by increasingly specific customer data. “It can’t be niche,” Carpenter continued. “It can’t make people feel separated from it. It’s not going to be political or religious. It’s going to be inspiring, positive. Airline magazines don’t write bad reviews. We don’t interview someone to make them feel dumb. It’s all about putting positivity out into the world.”
Max Rubin, a writer, noted that, when in-flight magazines were commonplace, it was the same era in which “you could watch a movie on an airplane but they’d fold down a screen every three rows and everyone would be watching the exact same thing at the same time,” he said. “It was a sense of connection. When I get on a plane now I feel more depraved and alone than I used to.” Rubin never heard more about a piece than when he wrote for American Way. “People out of the woodwork would send me photos on a plane being like, ‘Is this you?’” His travel writing spotlighted Los Angeles’s Little Bangladesh, the rise of “sleep retreats,” and an induction ceremony at the Whiskey Hall of Fame, at a castle in the Scottish highlands. The work was potent and ephemeral: I could find no records of those pieces online.
The whiskey story was for Celebrated Living, the in-flight magazine of American Airlines’ first and business classes. Many airlines have had separate editions for separate classes. Rhapsody, glowingly profiled in the New York Times, brought a “patina of sophistication” to United’s first-class cabin and sat in parallel to Hemispheres, which was for everyone else. Hoyt told me that a main goal for Rhapsody was to “distinguish it from Hemispheres as a brand.” Rhapsody was like “Vanity Fair in the front, something a little more literary in the back,” he said. The team behind Rhapsody comprised, at most, Hoyt remembered, ten people. “It kind of felt like we were a really good minor-league baseball team,” he said, doing things like wrangling Robert De Niro for the cover and sending first-string writers such as Rick Moody, Maggie Shipstead, and Jamie Quatro to the Aran Islands, a surfing expedition in Nicaragua, and the National Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto, respectively.
Zoom out, and the class differentiations between, say, Rhapsody and Hemispheres might be seen more dramatically. Crispin Thurlow and Adam Jaworski, in their book Tourism Discourse (2010), analyzed seventy-two in-flight magazines through the lens of the “banal enactment of globalization.” “I use the airline industry as a litmus, a metonymic manifestation, for global class formations,” Thurlow told me. “It’s such a great text: economy, premium economy, business class. Premium economy in particular is such an intriguing symbolic violence.” He noted that “the majority of the world’s population never steps foot on a plane,” which means, no matter where you sit, “you’re still one of the most privileged people on the planet.” Later, while on a flight, Thurlow emailed me a photo of a piece of paper (subject line: “This is where it’s at now”). On the flier for SWISS Magazine, placed in his seatback pocket, sat a large QR code holding the key to three downloadable articles you might peruse mid-flight: peek behind the SWISS curtain, most Instagrammable places, let Swiss hotelier Stephane take you through his chosen hometown.
SWISS Magazine, which moved to all-digital in 2022, is one of many such publications to abandon print, but the hand-holdable in-flight magazine is not a totally extinct creature. In-flight magazines in Asia—for instance Going Places (Malaysia Airlines), SilverKris (Singapore Airlines), and Morning Calm (Korean Air)—are going strong, as are others on international carriers. “The US is alone in this regard,” Clark said, pointing to a “300 percent global growth on post-COVID publications in the skies in the past two years.” Ink produces a bevy of them—and worked with United on the launch of the new Hemispheres site. Thurlow and Jaworski, in their study, paid particular attention to the ways in which airplane magazines, “however ‘ideologically innocent’ they may appear,” exert telling visions of the world through their route maps (which center hub cities, particularly in Europe), as well as to the ways they coax the consumer into taking them (“your free copy”) and to the advertisements contained within (“infinity pool loft apartments in downtown London”). “It’s a bourgeois fantasy,” Thurlow said. “They’re selling up a lot of the time.”
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.
Perhaps those of us who are occasionally captive on airplanes no longer think of ourselves as such, even though in-flight Wi-Fi, when it works, is often sponsored by a company to which we must give our name and email. The idea, increasingly, is personalization. Still, to those flying long enough to remember the genre, the removal of a magazine from a seatback pocket, which bears a sticker reading “Literature Only,” is indubitably more noticeable than the removal of an olive. “I love them,” so many people told me when I asked about the disappearance of in-flight magazines. Until recently, Heller said, airplanes were “one of the last spaces where you had a reader’s attention.” It is no wonder some of us can see so acutely in our minds’ eyes those “perfect days,” as an original Hemispheres series went. It last featured a glowworm cave in New Zealand, a secret samba spot in Rio de Janeiro, a walk with a countess in Venice, and other perfect, faraway possibilities.
Lucy Schiller is a professor of nonfiction writing at Texas Tech. Her first book, on older age in the United States, is forthcoming from Flatiron Books.