American Airlines featured both a first class lounge and a coach lounge on their Boeing 747 aircraft. Naturally the upper deck was for the well heeled passengers, while those in economy had a rather more spacious facility in the tail.
Special facilities on the new jumbo jet were quite the thing when it first entered service in 1970. Pan Am had a dining room upstairs, Qantas had the Captain Cook lounge and Philippine Airlines had bunks for first class passengers up there. Really!
American’s Coach Lounge
Product designers at American Airlines really hit it out of the park with their coach lounge. Seriously, this thing still looks contemporary today, as you can see in these vintage magazine ads.
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- Looks fantastic, doesn’t it?
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- Of course, they did advertise both.
Eventually they added a twist and added a piano for the only piano lounge in the sky. Anything to differentiate the product, and why not really!
AA Coach Lounge TV Commercial
This television commercial introducing the coach lounge in 1971 is pretty epic. It’s a full one minute ad, and while the quality is ropey in the beginning, it gets better. Wait until the ending, because her face on the last line is hilarious!
She is the same person in the first print ad, incidentally. I’m particularly interested in the other claims for coach passengers. “We’ve increased the legroom, and put in air cushions that adjust automatically to your back.” Considering the ultra slimline seats of today, I think we’re missing out – they sound pretty comfy!
Overall Thoughts
As we all know, lounges in aircraft largely went away, replaced by passenger seats for a better corporate bottom line at airlines. They only re-appeared on the Airbus A380, with perhaps Qatar Airways having the largest and nicest one. Once the A380s are gone, I’m sure that’ll be the end of lounges on planes for the most part.
It’s great to see what American Airlines had on board their Boeing 747s. I love the whole look, as it still looks very chic today. I’m not sure how long AA had these for, but I can’t see them having lasted much into the 1980s, if that.
Did you ever experience the American Airlines coach lounge either with or without the piano? What was it like? What do you think of how it looks? Thank you for reading and if you have any comments or questions, please leave them below.
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Featured image by Tim Rees on Airliners.net via Wikimedia Commons.
Coach lounge ad via Reddit.
Coach and First lounge ad via Boeing 747 Tumblr Gallery.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane. The B747 entered revenue service at a time when the industry was contracting ahead of a recession. I recall low season load factors on a route such as LAX-JFK being upper 40/low 50 percentiles during that time. The lounge was not only a competitive innovation to attract passengers, it was a means of utilizing onboard space that was otherwise going unused/underutilized.
Explore the interwebs a bit – you’ll find images of B747 lounges operated by other U.S. domestic carriers during the early 70s.
Yes, it was really bad timing for the airlines, as they got burned a bit in the early 1970s by that recession. There are quite a number of innovations like that around that time, even PSA had a lounge on their Lockheed TriStars (which I’ve written about before). Would have been a good time to fly on multiple airlines really – what an experience!
My first transcontinental trip on one. https://youtu.be/nKENjXZJ3yI
Yes, they don’t do it like that anymore!
We were a bunch of college kids heading to the Virgin Islands from NY. They overbooked the flight, so the airline rolled out another 747 for us and the few other passengers. Sorry I don’t remember the airline, but the plane was very new at the time. There were so few people on board we took over the piano lounge in the aft section of the plane, broke out our guitars and had a pretty good time in what felt like a private jet flight, only better!
Wow, now that is an awesome memory! Sounds like it would have been an amazing time for everyone really. That’s wonderful – thanks for that – wish I was there!!
Pretty nifty.
You mention American having the only piano lounge in the sky. I recall that Pan Am had piano lounges upstairs on their 747’s. I saw one on the first trip I was old enough to recall when I couldn’t sleep and was given a tour of the airplane. An amazing experience for a six year old.
That would have been something else, seeing something like that. Not jealous at all over here 🙂 haha!
Virgin 747s use to have a lounge seating area, next to the bar. A separate area for massges and manicures. Their 747-200s were stunning.
I remember hearing about that actually. Pretty slick! Virgin Atlantic have always been really good in that regard from what I hear.