Welcome to The Up Front Update — and our regular weekly news roundup of what you need to know in aviation comes at the end of quite the busy one for the first week in October.
Passenger experience professionals, frequent flyers and industry observers have a lot to think about from the news this week, so for once we’ve started with some news that isn’t necessarily the biggest thing going on this week, but we do reckon it’s the strangest.
The big (little) thing to note this week: American “brings mainline comfort to regional flights” with new seat covers for nearly 500 CRJ, E170/175 planes
Quick: think of a colour that says “premium” to you. Did you say “a sort of muddy mid-brown”? Well, American Airlines is revamping the seat covers on almost all of its two-class regional jets, and the seats it wants passengers to pay more for — the domestic first and Main Cabin Extra products — are marked out by separate colours on the headrests.
And it’s a really ugly brown.
Look, aesthetics are subjective, and perhaps American’s photos are not helped by the fact that the lighting in the aircraft is set to a full bright blue-white tone. Maybe it’s the lack of texture.
But a seat cover has to look good in any light, and these headrests just don’t differentiate as premium or luxury. Some browns might — look at the Pantone “Beautiful Browns” palette, which does not include this brown colour, or the “Quiet Luxury Brown” 2024 trend that ELLE Decor discussed.
The brown is clearly supposed to differentiate between the regular cheap seats (Main Cabin on American) and these, the ones that either carry an ancillary fee, are a higher class of service, or are part of the perks for a loyal frequent flyer. The colour does differentiate, visually at least, but not necessarily in a good way.
The brown actually extends throughout the aircraft’s seats down back as well, with the regular economy Main Cabin seats’ headrest seeing a streak of the brown on the top and sides of the otherwise dark blue headrest.
It’s not entirely clear where this odd brown colour came from in the American Airlines colour palette, but it does match the 787-9 headrests revealed earlier this year — quite the departure from the largely grey or blue-black-red interiors previously used by American.
Does this stuff matter? To misquote Miranda Priestly from The Devil Wears Prada: “This... ‘stuff’? Oh, okay. I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your [MRO hangar] and you select, I don't know, that lumpy blue [seat], for instance, because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your [airplane].”
Anyway, American has a lot of these planes — almost 500 of the CRJ and E170/175 to refit according to its fleet briefing pack [PDF] — so this rollout may take some time. Presumably, the nearly 100 E175 aircraft American has on order will, at some point, swap over from the previous interiors.
In practical upgrades, power will be provided at all seats, alongside the high-speed satellite wifi from SES (previously Intelsat, né Gogo) it first announced in 2023.
At the same time, in first class culinary developments, “customers in the premium cabin on regional flights can now enjoy a midday snack basket to complement the morning and evening snack baskets,” after the airline “has streamlined its onboard snack offerings to create a more consistent experience across both mainline and regional flights”. Slim Jims and tiny mini-bags of potato chips all round.
But the biggest news, which we’ve definitely been saving as a midday snack basket sort of treat, is that American — which launched the larger A320neo Airspace XL bins as retrofits for its older aircraft before the rest of the Airspace cabin débuted — is looking for bigger bins on its smaller planes too.
“American is working with Embraer on developing and designing larger overhead bins for our larger regional aircraft,” says the airline, noting that it “anticipates rolling out the aircraft with larger overhead bins in the coming years”.
This week on The Up Front:
How do you solve a problem like Lufthansa? We dive deep into the first part — 5,500-plus words — of our analysis of Lufthansa’s strategy from its Capital Markets Day investor briefing, all 121 pages of it.
The headline messages: Lufthansa is consolidating its 12–15 airlines, planning efficiencies in five of them, leaking out a new Lufthansa Group Lounge and brand concept, growing in longhaul and leisure (notably Eurowings), and there are passenger experience implications throughout.
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