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THE MAN ON THE TAIL: AN ALASKA AIRLINES WHOISIT

Last time on Runway Runway...

The short answer, reiterated: nobody knows.

The long answer: Nobody knows. A lot of people have no idea or have never even thought about it. Many people have a person in mind they think he resembles, but they know that it's probably wrong. A non-negligible number think they know, but they do not necessarily agree with each other. After the research I have done on the topic, I believe that I do know who this face is, but this is not going to be an argument for my position - merely a presentation of this logo's origins and the theories as to who this face represents, a few thoughts about community and feeling like something is part of yours, and the story of an incredible man.

But first, a content warning, and a disclaimer:

This post will discuss use of an outdated term used to refer to Inuit and Yupik peoples which is broadly considered offensive. It is, unfortunately, inseparable from the story of the face on Alaska Airlines' tailfins. While I have discussed somewhat heavy subjects, including racism, on this blog before, it has generally been in reference to statistics or vague allusions to commonly held offensive sentiments, and I think that discussing a specific word which has caused pain to a group of people requires a little bit more of a specific warning.

Below the cut, there will be discussions surrounding Alaska Airlines' use of said word, with a bit on its broader context. This post is not meant to be a downer, and I don't think it ultimately is. But there is a lot to the story of the "happy face", and there is no use telling the warm and fuzzy parts inside the hood of the parka while ignoring the temperature outside of it. There is so much more to this story than outdated language, but it is still a part of it that can't be left out without overlooking the very people who the tail represents.

I imagine the context of that warning, unfortunately, becomes clear immediately.

Indigenous Alaskans make up 15% of the state's population, made up of various groups of what are called 'circumpolar peoples', who historically lived in the very northernmost habitable parts of the planet - Alaska, Siberia, Greenland, and parts of Canada and Scandinavia. While these groups are broadly somewhat related they are distinct in culture and history.

Alaska, specifically, has over 200 federally recognized tribes, around the same number as is present in the entire rest of the country. (That has its own context, but my point here is to illustrate the diversity of indigenous Alaskan background.) These cultures include the Athabaskan, Aleut, Eyak, and the two that those without personal familiarity tend to think of - the Yup'ik and Iñupiaq. All of these terms themselves further comprise multiple communities, and indeed Yup'ik and Iñupiaq refer to specific groups of peoples from the larger groups of Yupik and Inuit peoples - the groups in question being the ones who live in Alaska rather than Siberia or Canada.

The reason this is important is that it is generally agreed that the face on Alaska Airlines' airplanes is an Alaskan Native, and specifically a member of one of these two groups. A few people apparently assume him to be Abraham Lincoln or Bob Marley or some other famous person (in fact, I am editing this to say that one of the replies to my first post was someone saying they'd always thought it was Abraham Lincoln) but I doubt these theories are ever serious. It would be weird to put a representative from Kentucky on a livery for Alaska Airlines (...which admittedly is based in Washington). The reasons for this assumption are fairly straightforward - it's a reasonable leap from a face surrounded by what looks like a fur hood being identified as Alaskan. But I wouldn't be making this post if the answer was just 'eh, some Alaskan Native'. (And I would find using the generic ornament of an indigenous group as branding more than a little tasteless, in all honesty.) It is broadly thought that this logo is based on the likeness of a specific individual. The question is who.

MEET OUR MYSTERY MAN

So, let's start at the obvious place. He's their logo, so...what does Alaska Airlines say about the identity of this mystery man? Let's take a look at the press release for their 2016 rebrand.

I'll be honest, I wasn't keeping up with airline livery news in 2016. Indeed, I wasn't keeping up with much of anything and I can't recall much from that period. So I...did not know about this, and it took the wind out of me a bit when I learned it happened.

So, let's begin with that term. 'Eskimo'. I feel gross even typing it. This is an exonym used to refer broadly to Yupik and Inuit peoples, though many who use it aren't necessarily aware that the term refers to multiple distinct cultures. I've heard it used for the Alaska Airlines man, and I had always assumed this was out of the ignorance of individual people. I live in the United States, where it's still often used casually (as are a few other unfortunate terms other places avoid - the country seems to have perpetually not gotten the memo, so to speak). In Canada, it is more or less universally considered to be offensive, due to the groups in question expressing their opposition to its use, and this seems to be the general trend over time in the US as well. So while, unfortunately, I do hear people casually say it from time to time, that's mostly annoying classmates. I didn't expect to hear it from Alaska Airlines.

The phrasing, however, is just as much of a problem. 'Our' Eskimo, as a probably unintentional consequence of phrasing choices, implies ownership of not just the logo but the man himself. I don't think I particularly need to explain why some might take issue with this.

And take issue they did. There was a petition! The hashtag #notyoureskimo was started on the website formerly known as Twitter. Anchorage Daily News quotes user angelascox making a statement I think really cuts to the quick of it: "No, @AlaskaAir … you don't own an Eskimo."

Alaska Airlines did listen.

Well, that's..........better, I guess. Unfortunately, it does still use the word 'Eskimo'. And I should note that it isn't universally considered offensive and I've found Alaskan Natives who state that they don't mind use of the term, but these seem to be the minority, and as time goes on it's being phased out further and further. In the context of Alaska Airlines' use, the Anchorage Daily News provides a few perspectives:

Maria Shaa Tlaa Williams, director of the Alaska Native Studies program at the University of Alaska Anchorage and Tlingit, said in an email the broader issue is about the use of "a somewhat antiquated word." "(Eskimo) is a colonial term and it should be: Inupiaq, Yup'ik/Cup'ik, Siberian Yupik or even Inuit, or even generic term such as Alaska Native," she said. Bobbie Egan, media relations director for Alaska Airlines, said the company made the decision to keep using the word "Eskimo" after conducting focus groups with Native leaders throughout Alaska, but she did not have details about those focus group results. "Many of our employees and customers commonly refer to themselves as Eskimo and we've always sought the input and counsel of employees and customers," she said.

I do wish those focus group results were made public, but all the same this isn't particularly surprising. Whenever a term begins to be considered offensive this opinion is generally adopted in a bit of a mosaic fashion, with typically younger people first expressing discomfort and those from different walks of life having their own opinions - some more swayed by the distasteful aspects, while others refuse to let that stop them from using a word they've called themselves their whole life. This is broadly true across all sorts of contexts. I do think it's never an outsider's place to critique someone's choice to use whatever language they feel best represents them, but if there is a large portion of the group in question who find it derogatory we should avoid using it ourselves. There are certainly 'outdated' terms I use for myself but would feel a bit unhappy seeing used carelessly by someone who didn't understand what it meant and was using it, bluntly, because they didn't know better or didn't care to know better. If you are from a group which has historically been derided by others you can probably fill in your own example here.

There are a few reasons for the distaste many have for the word 'Eskimo'. To begin with, it's an exonym. This term was not used as an identifier by any of these groups, but by outsiders to refer to them, and particularly by Europeans and settlers who heard these words from other groups they encountered earlier and then never bothered to ask the people in question what they actually called themselves. Beyond the inherent issue of self-determination, the fact that these were the historical users means that it was often pejorative and othering and ought to be left behind with terms like 'oriental'.

The term is generally thought to have originated from a corruption of an exonym used by one or more Algonquian-speaking groups. The most popular conception is that it stems from a Cree term meaning 'raw meat eater', which people understandably find pretty offensive. There are a number of other theories, and recently linguists seem to most support an interpretation that it is derived from an Innu-aimun word meaning 'one who laces a snowshoe'; it could have evolved from both of these terms or neither, and I don't think it matters when it is already widely perceived as meaning something offensive. 'Well, actually'-ing somebody who says a term is offensive to their ethnic group by pointing out a benign linguistic origin is a pretty pointless thing to do - we've had this conversation before about the name Lufthansa. But beyond that, basically every slur I can think of was once a completely innocuous word that just needed someone to invent a hateful enough way to use it. And people have been using this word rather hatefully for centuries. Regardless of origin, it is a dated exonym, and if the groups it refers to don't feel it represents them that's enough reason for me to stop using it.

The other reason that this term is broadly bad to use is that it's just not a good way of conveying which people you're talking about. 'Eskimo' is generally agreed to encompass Yupik and Inuit peoples, which are two large and diverse populations spread across Siberia and North America. These may be closely related and similar cultures but they are not interchangeable. 'Inuit' has recently seen more frequent use as a replacement, which is at least a step away from the language, but is often outright factually incorrect, as it will be used to refer to Yupik people - who are not Inuit, but are the largest indigenous population in Alaska. 'Alaskan Native' and 'circumpolar peoples' exist as umbrella terms which are understood to be umbrella terms by just about everyone, but there is a legitimate misconception that these groups are all the same because of the use of a single term for them.

Maybe Alaska Airlines uses the term because they think 'Alaskan Native' is awkward for a slogan and they don't want to tie themselves into knots by committing to specifying whether the man is Yup'ik or Iñupiaq. That would be a problem, as they don't actually know who he is.

Beyond the term, there is the issue of objectification on a larger scale than phrasing. Annie Wenstrup, the writer of the petition linked earlier, makes an important point - if the Alaska Airlines man is the likeness of a real person, that person has not been paid for its use. Beyond that, Alaska Airlines is using the very concept of an indigenous Alaskan to market itself. There is definitely a dehumanizing element to it. Alaska Airlines is far from the only company to have ever used ethnic groups as branding, and I think that ultimately it's not my place to linger on this topic. It would be wrong to not mention that this is an element of his story, that people do raise this issue, and that this is a discussion that should be had. I, however, don't have a fully developed opinion. This is a conversation for Alaskan Natives to have, I think - I just don't understand the context of their relationship with the airline specifically, and I have no more ownership of the man pictured than Alaska Airlines. Because he was not an object. There is every likelihood that he was a real person.

WHO IS THE MAN ON THE TAIL?

The website mentions a short film. Unfortunately, the Way Back Machine didn't manage to get it, but it did catch the associated article. The thing this article communicates most clearly is that nobody knows who this man is.

Whether the artists were inspired by [a real person] remains a mystery to this day – both within the company and without – as no official documentation has ever been uncovered indicating that [...] the Eskimo [...] was based on a specific person. Even Alaska’s archivists, a team of retirees and long-time employees passionate about preserving the company’s history, can’t agree.

As someone who is myself studying to be an archivist, I am currently tearing my hair out and flinging tables at people mere decades ago for never keeping any records!!! What is wrong with you people?! Why do you never think of me in the future wanting to know the context of things you probably think are obvious?!

Well, anyway, this might indicate that he's just a generic representation of an Alaskan Native. That would not just be a disappointing answer to this mystery, it would also be pretty offensive. I know that the NFL (an organization known for its racial sensitivity, as I think we're all aware) is a bit slow to catch onto this but I think at this point in history we're all on the same page about using indigenous groups as mascots, right? It's weird and dehumanizing. But that's generally in reference to a stock character based on a stereotype of this group, and often one which is an offensive caricature. Given the percentage of Alaskan Natives in the population, some of whom were certainly involved in making Alaska Airlines what it is, isn't there a chance that this is a loving homage to the group native to the land this airline represents? A way of saying 'this is who this airline connects to faraway places'? I think this was certainly at least the intention, and whether this is still tokenizing, whether the phrasing on the website - a warm, welcoming presence and a reminder of commitment - stirs up an uncomfortable feeling is ultimately a question for Alaskan Natives, and one with a far less unanimous answer than that of outdated terminology.

However, I'll say this up front: he is not a generic representation. He is a specific individual. If he weren't I wouldn't have written a whole post about him.

So let's go all the way back to the beginning. If we do this we find our mystery man was actually not created to be a generic literal face of Alaska Airlines. The intention was not an indigenous mascot, but to represent Alaska's heritage...in more than one way. Mr. Alaska Airlines was once a jellybean.

YOU MIGHT AS WELL PUT HIM ON THE TAILS

image: Vic Warren

In 1972 a set of four new "Alaskana" liveries were introduced for Alaska Airlines' relatively small 727 fleet, replacing the older 'Gold Nugget Jet'. (I will definitely be reviewing those one day.) They were designed by Vic Warren and meant to represent the heritage of Alaska's population, and came in four variants:

"The Prospector" - in red, a miner with his pick, representing the people who flocked to Alaska from the lower 48 during the Gold Rush

"The Totem Pole" - in green, a totem pole design representing Southeast Alaskan indigenous groups such as the Eyak, Tlingit, and Haida - I wish I could be more specific but I can't seem to find the specific totem pole this is based off of

"The Onion Dome" - in fuchsia, today I learned that's actually what those are frequently called! They are meant to represent the history of Russians in Alaska.

And, "The....you know. Him." He's in blue. You may notice he looks a little bit less genial here. , and there's a bit of lighter color detail. No elaboration needed.

It does feel distinctly less tokenizing when there's a white prospector right next to him. In fact, the rephrasing in the quote taken from the archivists is actually because they were referring to both our mystery man and the prospector, whose identity is even more lost to history. This feels quite a bit less sinister than naming your football team a racial slur. It's like if an airline representing Massachusetts (keep reading, Cape Air, this is a free idea for you) had a set of jellybeans featuring a Wampanoag person, a furious man in the process of being given a traffic citation, a whale, a large textile workers' strike, a university-aged Dunkin Donuts employee who can just barely cover the rent at the two-bedroom apartment they share with seven roommates, Giles Corey being pressed to death, Paul Revere, the Harvard University logo, and Tom Brady. It goes from feeling exclusively dehumanizing to

Over the years, though, use of the other three designs dropped off. I'm not sure why it did (well, I can hazard a guess about the Onion Dome) but that's just the reality. Maybe the totem I understand being difficult to immediately identify as a totem when it's in monocolor with little detail on a large plane. I do think it's a bit of a shame - I love jellybeans and I love representing more than one culture in a place as large as Alaska - but I get it, their fleet was small.

As for why our mystery man won the deadlock with the Prospector, that's beyond me, but it almost feels like it was destined given he was the initial basis for the concept at all. Again from Vic Warren:

The first time the Eskimo art was used was in a large newspaper ad promoting Arctic Tours. [...] Since it was a newspaper ad, the initial appearance of the Eskimo was as a large, strong black image. The marketing director at Alaska hated it, even though the ad performed well. [...] A few months later, [I was] given the assignment to create a new corporate image for the airline [...] At this time the airline [...] only flew from Seattle to Alaska and within Alaska. They had recently moved their headquarters from Anchorage to Seattle and were taking a lot of political flak for abandoning Alaska. Our direction from the airline was to “create something very distinctive and modern, yet totally Alaskan.” In retrospect, it sounds easy, but I worked for three months on every kind of jet design I could think of. [...] the airline’s account executive was sitting with me in my office. [...] He stood up and stomped out of the room, shouting, “Oh, to hell with it! You might as well put that damned Eskimo on the tails!” Ta-daaaaaa! [...] I looked at the history and culture of Alaska and came up with four designs [...] But it shortly became evident that the Eskimo was the most popular image. And it was expensive to use all those different designs, so the other three left.

And thus Mr. Alaska Airlines was brought on board properly. And people were very attached to him. The thing mentioned earlier, that the airline was getting flak for losing their Alaskan identity - that comes back later in 1988, when the airline considered replacing him with a logo of a stylized mountain in the shape of the letter A. People hated this new logo so much I cannot even find a picture of it. This attempted replacement was for reasons unrelated to the criticisms I've mentioned earlier - he looked bad when printed small, was difficult to recognize, and might suggest to the people of California that Alaska Airlines only flew to Alaska. People were so incensed about this idea, however, that the state legislature decided this was a problem for them to tackle. From the LA Times:

The Alaska Legislature, which went into session on Monday, will consider a resolution asking the Seattle-based airline not to junk the colorful logo for one featuring a stylized mountain, said state Sen. Tim Kelly of Anchorage. [...] Alaska’s 20 state senators have voiced support for the resolution, he said.

Do they not have anything better to do with their time? No...zoning laws or tax brackets or ordinances? I mean, they've got some experience in aviation, I guess - they did make it illegal to push a moose out of a plane, or to look at moose from a plane. You also can't get a moose drunk. Actually, they have a lot of oddly specific moose-related laws, which I think is a form of environmental storytelling. You also can't wake up a sleeping bear to take a photograph of it. Safety is a priority, though - it's illegal to sell a child a stun gun and you need a concealed-carry permit for slingshots, so their priorities are clearly in important places.

Regardless, one thing Kelly said stood out to me. Emphasis mine:

“It may not be the best representation of an Eskimo, but it’s our Eskimo,” he said. “(Alaskans) feel an affinity with the airline. Alaskans feel it’s their airline.”

Okay, so this could be one of two things: a coincidence (more plausible, I guess, since it's not that weird of a combination of words) or an intentional reference to this statement by the company, which I think I would respect a bit more - a nod to history, all that - but if this is the case it seems quite strange they wouldn't have mentioned it as context for the use of their phrase when apologizing for it. Not important, just wanted to bring it up.

Despite the fact that the airline got a letter of support - “a graphic designer who is related to a pilot thought it was good"- they obviously did not replace him. Vic Warren actually weighed in himself on the topic:

My position was that if the airline’s image was confusing, it was because of the name Alaska Airlines, not the Eskimo logo. If they wanted to be a more amorphous regional carrier they should change their name to a version in the Air West mold or, at any rate, something less specific than Alaska.

And I do think I agree with him. You can choose between being relatable to everyone or having a heritage, making your brand just as much about where you started as where you are. I prefer the latter, but I have the opposite mindset of an airline. I am all about history and expression, and don't remotely care about attracting customers or making money. There is a reason Alaska Airlines doesn't have a tumblr blog.

“The Eskimo is a friendly, human symbol of the north, of the spirit of Alaska,” wrote Satch Carlson, an Anchorage Daily News columnist. “Take him off the Alaska planes in favor of some abstract, hip, meaningless design, you’re taking one step closer to that impersonal austerity that characterizes most other airlines today.”

...wow, so even in '88 they were tired of Eurowhite, it seems.

THAT LOGO THAT LOOKS LIKE MY TIO

So of course they kept the face. He got tweaked over the years - the 'fly with a happy face' campaign adjusted him to look a little bit less stoic, and of course the details were updated as graphics technology improved. But this is The Alaska Airlines Guy now. People are attached to him. An interesting effect of this attachment, though, is that a lot of people are pretty sure they know who he is, and that he's from their town.

People already recognize him as any number of a massive slew of celebrities. I find this extra fascinating because I actually have congenital prosopagnosia - I cannot recognize human faces, and while I can generally identify people in daily life by context like voice, posture, fashion sense, and hair, recognizing people from photographs is far more difficult. Unless I have two pictures next to each other and can compare the individual features it's basically useless - I never get that sort of 'click' of recognition - so it's been really interesting reading all the different associations people had, of which I have seen literally dozens if not hundreds. Reddit user DaBigBird27, in one of my favorite anecdotes, relates an experience where he was told by an LAX employee to look for the logo that looks like "his tio". And isn't it incredibly fascinating how that works? How you can tell someone you've only just met to find the picture that looks like your tio, and they'll know what you mean?

Look, there's something about grandfathers. I don't know what it is. (Uncles too, probably - I don't have any, though.) I hope I'm not insane for saying this, so any other grandfather enjoyers can weigh in, but I feel like grandfathers occupy a certain formative place in everyone's mind. He is one's earliest exposure to an old man and thus becomes their fundamental conception of one. Unless he is phenomenally cruel this ties him together, part and parcel, with the features of old men that can bring you comfort and happiness. I certainly experience this with my grandfather, despite having known him for a really tragically short length of time. If I were able to recognize faces, I think there's a very real chance that I would have thought the Alaska Airlines man was him for a moment.

And this seems extra true for those from Alaska. The Anchorage Daily News continues to provide a lot of anecdotes of locals discussing the universal feeling of proximity to the logo.

Perry Eaton, an Alutiiq artist who is originally from Kodiak Island but now lives in Anchorage, said that some people insist they know the Eskimo's true identity. "It's always been sort of a tongue-in-cheek conversation," Eaton said. "Nobody's gotten emotional over it, it's just sort of interesting. He's very iconic. Some folks are adamant that they know who it is."

“If you’re from Barrow, you think maybe he’s from Barrow. If you’re from Kotzebue, you think maybe he’s from Kotzebue. If you’re from Nome, you think maybe he’s from Nome,” says former mayor Lukin. “I have not met an Eskimo elder who doesn’t sort of smile like that.”

Another piece of writing, although accompanying a story that (as far as I can tell) is fiction, or at least dramatization, contains some context that is definitely not:

By the way, that page also had a lively discussion which included a number of other theories about the origin of the image, a number of people claiming a family relationship with the person depicted [...] Whatever the case, the image has obviously evolved and become less stern over the years. When the image was digitized there were further touch-ups and adjustments made. Most sources agree, though, that a remarkable number of native Alaskan people say that the person: “looks just like my grandfather!”

Even Alaska Airlines' own (archived) website describes this phenomenon.

“When I was a little kid, we all thought it was our own grandfathers,” says former Kotzebue mayor Maija Lukin. “We all thought it was our tata. Even if it didn’t remotely look like our grandfathers.”

Well, let me finally get to the point, because at least some of these people are correct. While he was intended to represent Alaskan Natives as a whole, the man was based on the likeness of a real person. There are two leading theories thought to be plausible. Both were real Alaskan Natives with ties to aviation who lived memorably in the proper timeframe to have inspired the logo.

CHESTER SEVECK

I'll begin with Chester (his full name seems to have been Chester Asagaq Seveck Downey but he is most frequently called Chester Seveck), who is the more common theory. (And indeed the man on the tail is frequently referred to as 'Chester' by people who think this.) The above-quoted Kotzebue mayor, for example, is convinced it's Chester, who was himself a Kotzebue resident. It's a remote place which relies on air travel to provide necessities, and Chester was said to have greeted passengers and crew as they left the airplanes together with his wife. He was often mentioned to be a reindeer herder, but I was afraid that this would be all I could find about this man who clearly was beloved by so many people that to this day he's remembered this widely.

Thankfully, unlike so many people who pass into history with only vague and distant reference to memorialize their full and remarkable lives, Chester Seveck has written a memoir, published by a bush pilot who considered him a close friend. It's called Longest Reindeer Herder and is available in its entirety for free, with the pilot and friend in question, Frank Whaley, including a selection of photographs he himself took of Chester. I really recommend everyone read it. It's not very long but it's extremely dense with information, giving a first-hand account of the development of airborne connections between remote regions from the side that doesn't normally get to tell their story. It also tells a lot about Chester, his family, and the incredible things which happened to him. One that really stuck with me was the time he was shot with a rifle but unharmed, because his parka absorbed the force of an entire bullet! It reads almost like a journal, very matter-of-fact and brief recounting of events which would have at the time been whirlwinds of emotions and little details now lost to the steady flow of history, but all of this was put to paper at once, and it's staggering just how much one life really is, how much we can learn from just some of one man's memories. About him, about the world he lived in, and about reindeer herding.

When it comes to aviation, Chester's experiences are a joy to read. He recounts his first time coming to the US, together with his wife.

Then Jack Whaley take us to Los Angeles. We flew in night time. We saw the lights down under us. I remember when we newly married in the year 1912 July 12th, I was dreaming my wife and I we saw the stars and sky under us. We were above the sky and stars I told my wife. Now my dream come true.

Eventually Chester, too old to continue his work with massive herds of reindeer, retired and began to work for Wien Airlines, traveling for promotional tours and guiding tours in Kotzebue. He refers to this as 'herding tourists'.

There are stories of the Lower 48, too, of the tours he went on with his wife. He mentions appearing with Steve Allen, Art Linkletter, and even Groucho Marx. He appeared in a minor role in "Ice Palace" (1960), a very poorly reviewed film which also happened to be the motion picture debut of one George Takei.

The final section of his memoir:

For long live and joy life, I believe these things--Keep busy and do good work. Have much good exercise. Eat good food, no waste anything and every day enjoy what it gives and do not spoil this day with much worry of tomorrow. Be happy. I know this way how I be "Longest Reindeer Herder." Start 1908, finish 1954, altogether 46 years herd reindeer.

Chester was undeniably a gregarious person. He seemed to really genuinely enjoy the high profile his partnership with Wien brought him, not for any material gains but because seeing the world and showing it to other people made him happy. He had a high opinion of himself that he wasn't afraid to share but there wasn't an ounce of pompousness in it; he just knew what he was worth. He loved talking about himself and his story - I found at least one other interview he gave. If more people were like Chester I think the world would be a much happier place. I really envy the people who got to have him show them around Kotzebue.

His memoirs were taken down in 1973, and the ending sort of reads as if he's right at the end of his life, but that's not true. He lived until 1981, dying ten days after his ninety-first birthday. He has many living descendants, with 172 grandchildren and great-grandchildren at the time he wrote his memoir. I actually saw a couple of them in the wild while researching, talking about growing up and being told he was the face on the airplanes.

Chester is by far the most common claim for the Alaska Airlines face. People from Kotzebue are proud of this. I saw another Reddit commentor, who has since deleted their account, mentioning their mother telling them about him growing up.

I think Chester is a fantastic person to feature. His connection to aviation and his warmth and kindness, eagerly welcoming tourists into his home village, makes him a fantastic symbol of Alaska. This post has been my favorite to research of any I've written. Reading people's warm memories of BWIA and learning about the incredible history of aviation in Sri Lankan folklore are both things I cherish, but reading Chester's account of his own life was genuinely almost overpowering. I am a history student. Sure, I study public history specifically, but I still study history. I read about history. I read long textbooks, in-depth research documents, and primary sources. I read old newspapers, memoirs, observations by travelers. My sophomore seminar was an in-depth study of remarkably preserved legal documents from one specific witch trial in 17th-century Germany. It's rare that something comes around like Chester's memoir that reminds me how much I adore humans. We have always had so much to give. There is a legitimate debate about the ethics of Alaska Airlines monetizing the likeness of an indigenous group, but I'm happy that they put a face on their tails if only because it means I got to read Chester's writing. I wish more people did.

But there's one other person frequently speculated to be the face of Alaska Airlines, and it would be remiss not to discuss him.

OLIVER AMOUACK

There is less available about Oliver than there is about Chester - at least, less I could find. He appears to have lived from 1895 to 1987, and unlike Chester, who I only ever saw called 'Eskimo', Oliver was known to be Iñupiaq. In the 1950s he was a performer in a travelling show called "It's Alaska!", but that's about all you can find with search engines.

image: Alaska Airlines Corporate Archives This is more or less the only image of Amouack I could find. He's the man on the left. Look familiar? That's not a rhetorical question. I'm face-blind.

That isn't all there is to be found, but what else there is I don't have access to at present. Brenda Ritchey, Oliver's granddaughter, has written a biography of him - "Know the Happy Face: Biography of Oliver Amouak", published 1997. The thing is, this book is crazy hard to get your hands on. Buying a copy is definitely way out of my price range. It's hard to find them for double-digit dollar amounts, and they go up over a thousand. There are several copies held by public libraries but most are in Alaska, which is pretty far away from me. Thankfully, there is one in a collection in New York, and I'm trying to get it on interlibrary loan. If I can get access to it, I'll make a follow-up post, hopefully adding context to Oliver's story like I did for Chester's. Clearly, his granddaughter thought it was worth telling.

Although Oliver is the less frequent claim, a few people are very confident that it's him. And it is impossible to prove conclusively whether it's him or Chester, or neither...or is it?

POINTING THE FINGER

This is where history ends and speculation begins. What you read from here is not fact - it is my own conjecture, made by someone with around a week's worth of research - someone who is literally unable to distinguish human faces, no less - and I encourage questioning it. But I'm going to make my argument: I am loosely convinced that the face on Alaska Airlines' airplanes is, in fact, Oliver Amouack.

The first set of reasons are contextual. Oliver, when he was in "It's Alaska!", was directly employed by Alaska Airlines, while Chester, though he did greet tourists for the airline, seemed to have much closer ties to Wien Air Alaska. If someone was looking for inspiration in Alaska Airlines' archives I think it's far more likely that they would have stumbled on Oliver's likeness than Chester's.

The second is, admittedly, rather weak, but I still feel it's worth mentioning. While the modern "happy face" is smiling, the original Alaskana image was not.

Take a look. This man is very poised, but he's also definitely got a bit of a stern look.

Now, while there do exist images of Chester Seveck where he isn't smiling, they are rare and mostly candid, taken while he's focused on doing something, like herding reindeer or singing, and often faced mostly away from the camera. They also tend to be from when he was younger, which the man in the image is clearly not. Given how frequently he was seen looking overjoyed just to be wherever he was, I find it a little bit unlikely that Chester would inspire an image I would go so far as to describe as 'frowning'.

image: Vic Warren

Now that's a bit more like Chester, but this isn't the original image. Rather, it's a later edit to make him smile, for Alaska's "fly with a happy face" campaign. I find it somewhat hard to believe that, were this Chester, it would have needed editing at all.

I also think that, were he to be the basis for the image, Chester would have brough it up when putting down his story. His memoir is from 1973, and the livery was introduced in 1972 with an even earlier newspaper ad featuring the same image. Chester had the healthiest high self-esteem I've seen in my life and he would definitely have mentioned this with pride. Maybe he was never told, but I suspect if this were the case he would have asked about it. It would be a little hard to not notice your own face on an airplane while greeting its occupants.

There's a major spanner in the works, though. That spanner is Vic Warren, designer of the initial Alaskana liveries, himself. Although it is no longer up, the Way Back Machine has helped me find an old post on his blog, discussing the logo and his design process. When I quoted him earlier, that's where I got it from. And he does kneecap my theory quite a bit - he outright states it's Chester.

Back in 1973, when I designed the Eskimo, an elderly Eskimo gentleman in Kotzebue was working as a greeter for the airline on its Arctic Tours. You got off the plane in Kotzebue and he was one of the folks who came up and helped you into a fur-trimmed parka to protect you from the cold. It was sort of an Eskimo version of the Hawaiian lei. We had photos of him and others during the welcoming procedure. I used one of those photos as the basis for the art. His name was Chester Seveck Downey. Surprisingly, lots of rumors have announced that the art was based on all sorts of people, including Richard Nixon. Once, I heard a story that he was really Bob Marley!

So that should settle it, right? Maybe. Actually, though, I think Vic Warren may be misremembering. I don't mean to gaslight this artist who created an extremely recognizable and enduring logo, but he already states that the design was done in 1973, which is impossible because the liveries were introduced in 1972. He actually gives 1973 as a date throughout the post multiple times, even though I've seen it claimed the design was in the works as early as 1970. The post was first written in 2014, so I think it's perfectly reasonable for your memory to slip over 40 years.

Getting a date slightly wrong and forgetting who you based a logo on are two different levels, but I'd like to further argue my earlier point - if the reference truly was Chester greeting passengers I am absolutely sure he would have been smiling, and I can't imagine why Warren would have changed this in his art. I think it's possible he misremembered, and I also think it's possible he assumed the photograph of Oliver was of Chester somehow. Far be it from me to accuse someone I've never met of racism, but, look, most people fail implicit association tests. I think it is entirely plausible a (presumably) white man contracted by an airline he didn't work for personally could see a photograph of one indigenous man and just assume that it was of a different one he was more familiar with, especially if Oliver and Chester have similar faces, which I assume people who can tell think they do.

I don't think any of that conjecture is particularly convincing. I wouldn't personally be convinced by it. The burden of proof here is a lot higher than 'maybe he was confused'. But what finally swayed me to believing Amouack is most likely our man was a post on, of all sites, the digital sewer pipe known as Quora.

An aside: Quora has introduced a feature where at the top of the page you are given a response by ChatGPT. While this is going to give you an answer of higher quality than many of those provided by the 'human' users of the website, I find the answer it generated for this question both incredibly factually wrong and somewhat disrespectful.

So the most obvious thing is that ChatGPT is misgendering Oliver/Chester. This immediately makes it clear that this answer is fully nonsense to basically anyone sentient, though it still may well fool some Quora users. The 'names' given, Tlingit and Haida, are both those of indigenous Pacific Northwest peoples. As in ethnicities, not individuals. Fred Kabotie was a real person, and a real artist, and accomplished and prolific, and someone you should absolutely learn about, but he was not Tlingit - he was Hopi. As in, from Arizona.

image: Grand Canyon National Park

I am rather confident Fred Kabotie has nothing to do with Alaska Airlines.

What really disturbs me is that, while there is an option to ask more questions in an app, and an option to downvote, there is no place to state that the information given is wrong, never mind to correct it. Even the app formerly known as Twitter has that.

Beyond that, there's no way to give this feedback to the bot. Downvoting isn't the same thing as actual negative reinforcement. This means that there is no way to stop the bot from giving the same answer to the same question in the future, even though it is wrong, and even though in this particular case a major aspect of its wrongness is that it seems to believe all North American indigenous people are one coherent group to the point it considers Hopi the same category as Iñupiaq, which is a bit like lumping together Spain and Norway.

So, not to pontificate, but this is one of the reasons ChatGPT is so potentially dangerous. It can generate text which seems quite a bit like an answer while being completely gibberish, and it could certainly fool people. Deep-learning algorithms, as of right now, are not capable of fact-checking. You should never rely on them for answers.

Besides that, though, there are actual human responses. Most of them are, as you may expect of Quora, total dreck. But sandwiched in between someone who seemed to be under the impression that it's ambiguous if Chester was from Kotzebue or Nome and someone who appeared to believe the term 'prop' didn't encompass turboprops was an answer given by Keith Holmes, whose qualifications are 'knows Dutch'.

That doesn't sound promising, but he actually came with evidence. I'm going to give you the short version, but you should read his answer. Here is his method:

He took the original image of the logo, then flipped it horizontally to match the image of Oliver Amouack from the It's Alaska! poster.

Then he overlaid them and very slowly lowered the opacity. Like, it's torturously slow, so I'll just show some 'keyframes', but that slowness means that even I, faceblind as I am, could clearly see that they line up nearly perfectly.

In the 1970s, this process would have been done with physical paint. But nowadays it's incredibly easy to just up the contrast and lower the saturation on an image. So Holmes (aptly named) did precisely this.

...yeah. I mean, there he is. I think we found him.

AN IDENTITY UNCOVERED

So, there it is. People's opinions vary about who this man is and whether he should be on the tails at all, but I think it's Oliver Amouack. But I want to finish off this post, which has had its ups and downs, on a somewhat open-ended yet positive note.

No matter who this face is, there are people who love him. And I'm not talking about people who love making money off him, or about senators. I mean regular Alaskans. Even Annie Wenstrup, in the original text of her petition, acknowledged that there is a warm fuzzy feeling that people have about him. Though its inclusion is definitely potentially a bit sinister, the Alaska Airlines page discussing the history of the logo released concurrently with the rebrand touches on it.

“When I see that face, I feel proud. I feel like I’m home,” says Sallee Baltierra, a concierge in Alaska’s Anchorage Board Room airport lounge. “I love to see that Eskimo on the tail in other cities that we fly to, from Liberia, Costa Rica to Nashville, Tennessee. It makes me feel like there’s a little piece of home there waiting for me.”

The ethics of how it is done in this particular case are worth discussing, and whether the logo as it stands now should be retired is not something I am in a position to weigh in on. For better or worse the happy face is part of Alaska Airlines' history. The mystery has been put out there for people to solve, and it won't go away if they take him off the planes.

And while there are good reasons, reasons I agree with, that people scoff at the idea of representation being the same thing as justice, particularly when those with no skin in the game are making millions off it, Alaskan Natives are most of the history of Alaska, and they have propped up Alaska Airlines from its earliest days. They have been pilots, cabin crew, ground crew, maintenance, customer service, passengers, and, yes, tour guides. They have been there from the earliest days of McGee Airways, and when Alaska Airlines finally goes under they will be there on its very last flight. There is a difference between acknowledgment and objectification, and that line is not one for me to draw, but it is at least good that the question of who this man is can lead people to the stories of the real people who are so often forgotten.

The fact that I believe the happy face is Oliver doesn't make that reality. It could well be Chester. It could be someone else. It could be your grandfather. It definitely isn't my grandfather, but I showed my mother a picture and she did say that he looks very much like my grandfather...we are not Alaskan Native, I think it goes without saying. I don't think anyone I'm related to has ever even been to Alaska.

But I think there's something positive to be taken from his anonymity to most of the world. There are certainly negatives, the sticking points of profit and objectification, but were it not for the fact that there was a mystery here to dive down I would have never known Chester Seveck existed, never mind read his memoir. I wouldn't have known Oliver Amouack existed either, and I hope I can read his memoir too. If there is any reason for me to 'well, actually' someone who says the face is definitely Chester - and I'm not sure there is - it wouldn't be because it isn't him, but because I want to give Oliver the same recognition.

And I hope other people wonder who the face is, and look for the answer online. My blog isn't very large, and I'm entirely happy with that. I love writing my incredibly niche posts about airlines, and I'm not doing this with any expectation or hope of fame. But given the small amount of articles on the topic I hope that my blog shows up in the search engine results, maybe on the second or third page, and that maybe it can direct someone to Chester's story. I am overjoyed to have read it and I want other people to read it too. His life was a unique and meaningful one and I am grateful that he chose to share it with the world. I am excited to pass it on to all of you.

I set out to find the identity of the man on Alaska Airlines' livery. What I found was the story of a man who touched far more than Alaska Airlines. The happy face could be anyone. He could be your grandfather. He could be (and probably is) Brenda Ritchey's grandfather. In a sense I think, although his literal family should be compensated for use of his likeness, he is your grandfather - not because he is literally your grandfather, but because he carries that poised warmth that so many grandfathers have. I think there is a real benefit to leaving this open-ended - at least enough to keep that mystique that drives people to make that Google search and learn about the overlooked and thought-to-be-nameless indigenous men who make Alaska what it is. Maybe the real happy face was the grandfathers we thought he resembled along the way.

And Alaska Airlines be damned, Chester Seveck herded reindeer for 46 years and had his dream of stars and sky beneath him come true. That's more valuable, to me, than having a famous picture based on you. Pictures reflect reality, but Chester was real, and it is accounts like his which make history human.

#double sunrise #alaska airlines #era: 1970s #jellybeans #region: north america #region: united states

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runwayrunway · 7 months

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No. 54 - Ryanair

You are watching a video on a popular video sharing service. It is a full episode of a popular and long-running show, generously uploaded for free. It is narrated by a calm man with a BBC accent of the sort which belongs exclusively in documentaries.

The narrator names a date between 1903 and the current year. It is accompanied by a location - an airport. An airplane is on approach. It has a certain number of people on board, and it flies for some airline. There are pilots, most likely two of them. They make some sort of mistake, and maybe there's an issue with the weather, or the ILS is down, or the instruments are giving misleading information, or some other thing has gone tailcone over teakettle in an alarmingly short timespan and now their approach is tremendously unstable. They aren't on the glideslope. They're too fast or too slow. They really need to declare a missed approach, but for whatever reason they don't.

The plane lands, or 'lands' - finds itself on the ground, regardless - either on or short of the runway. It bounces, or flips over, or just pancakes into the ground. The fuselage cracks, or splits, or peels open, or horribly catches fire. There is an evacuation. It's all very stressful at minimum, and an unmitigated tragedy at worst.

You scroll down to the comments for some reason. "Average Ryanair landing," says one near the top.

Ryanair (not to be confused with Ryan Air, a real but unrelated airline) is Europe's largest air carrier. It has over 550 airplanes and serves over 200 destinations. It is difficult to imagine an airline with a worse reputation - their CEO is a literal troll, their customer service is legendarily poor, and their ultra-low-cost model is one in which you inevitably get what you pay for. They are memetically despised, and their rough landings are the stuff of legend.

And yet their livery is understated, with a certain head-held-high gravitas. It is difficult to describe the legitimate cognitive dissonance which arises from Ryanair's aerosartorial choices, an effect that seems to touch more people than just me. On another airline, I wouldn't find this livery particularly thought-provoking. Enough substance to write a post about, but not something which lurks in my mind and draws my attention. But on Ryanair, it's downright fascinating.

I've said what I've said, but I'm actually a defender of Ryanair. Look, it's like getting a ticket on a bus or the metro. It's cheap (at least in theory - they seem to be getting pricier lately) and it gets you where you need to go and it's probably not going to be that long of a flight anyway so, I mean, whatever. I've flown some pretty long flights before in-flight entertainment was standard, Ryanair is fine. I never even noticed the hard landings until I saw people talking about them, and to be perfectly honest I didn't notice them afterward either. Maybe I'm just not bothered by hard landings, the same way I'm not bothered by turbulence. Who really knows? My point is that I'm something of a Ryanair apologist. I live in the US, where you just don't get dirt cheap flights like that and getting anywhere outside of your home metropolitan area by train (and even sometimes bus) costs even more than flying. Ryanair could make me board the plane by abseiling up it myself to save money on airstairs and I'd be fine with it if the price was right. I'm not a millionaire. I haven't got the money to go jetsetting around Europe on a real airline. So I mean this when I say it: thank goodness for Ryanair.

I mean, I'm not saying this because Ryanair is good, don't get me wrong. They are the Big Bill Hell's of airlines. They are the closest thing we have to John Mulaney's version of Delta. Ryanair is not just no-frills, it's hot-glued fabric scraps in the vague shape of a garment. They are legitimately comical in their commitment to service so Kafkaesquely bad that you almost wish you'd travelled by trebuchet instead! And all this for the low, low price of...well, I mean, they do get pretty low.

When I released my first questionnaire I added a question about Ryanair specifically because of its reputation and my own feelings about the airline. Multiple people did agree with me - well, it's definitely not comfortable at all, you won't enjoy yourself, but it's so obscenely cheap that this isn't really objectionable. You are getting exactly what you pay for. And, well, if you do want some semblance of the full-service experience you can pay an extra fee. Or a lot of extra fees. That's how they get you. The ULCC model relies on stripping out everything possible and then charging you extra for it. That does mean that if you need things like printed boarding passes or the ability to pay by credit card that come standard with literally any other airline you could end up paying a decent amount for your miserable cramped flight, but if you truly want the bare minimum they will charge you appropriately, and that is so important to me, because I have too little money to insist on being comfortable.

I do feel...particularly sorry for one respondent.

It isn't bad press they are legitimately a nightmare. A attendant once lied to me and told me that type of plane just didn't have toilets (it did. There was a working toilet on board) then proceeded to lecture me about 'not planning ahead and going in the airport'

This is kind of hilarious in a sad way and I'm very sorry that this happened to you. Ryanair is infamous for its bad customer service but it's rare you'll hear about cabin crew behaving this poorly at any airline. While this particular incident was a one-off, you probably will have a pretty miserable time if you need to call the airline about literally anything.

One person just answered 'bitches'.

Well, that answers the question "what is Ryanair", but why is Ryanair?

The world is full of low-cost carriers. Wizz Air, EasyJet, airasia, Allegiant, Jetstar, FlySafair, Volaris, T'Way, Azul, Nok Air, Frontier, Lion Air, jetBlue, and SpiceJet are just some of the dozens which fill the skies. They are often colourful, frequently grumbled about, and essential.

Low-cost carriers, and especially ULCCs, are a relatively recent phenomenon. They only sprung into being after aviation stopped being by necessity a luxury product. It's generally agreed that PSA (Pacific Southwest Airlines), an intrastate carrier from California colloquially known as the Poor Sailor's Airline, was the first low-cost carrier. While the large interstate carriers of the time had a sort of detached gravitas to both their services and their prices, and were often prevented from lowering said prices anyway due to federal taxes that didn't apply to intrastate carriers like PSA, a ticket on "The World's Friendliest Airline" was cheap and the service was casual and personable. The low-cost model is built on being an option for a normal person. If you don't have the money to fly TWA, you can fly on an airline which is made for normal people and charges you accordingly.

The model didn't really catch on immediately, though. I couldn't exactly say why - it might have to do with the lack of demand for air travel that wasn't either commuter flights or long-haul. There was some activity in the market, with Loftleiðir (a precursor to Icelandair) offering cheap-as-dirt transatlantic flights in the 60s and Laker Airways having a three-year tenure in the late 70s serving a similar market from a Western European base. Even today the long-haul low-cost market they served is notoriously difficult to make anything work in.

What is generally thought to be the next major player in low-cost airlines, Southwest, emerged in 1971. David Neeleman further refined the model, first with innovations in cost-cutting at Morris Air and later by raising the bar for customer experience at jetBlue. David Neeleman, though, was active right at the turn of the millennium. Low-cost carriers only really began to emerge in real numbers in the 80s and 90s, with examples that are long-gone, like the infamous ValuJet, existing alongside ones US residents have probably seen at their local airport, like Spirit.

Spirit is different from jetBlue and Southwest. Spirit Airlines is not just a low-cost carrier but an ultra low-cost carrier. As the name suggests, the difference is one of scale. A low-cost carrier provides less comprehensive and less ritzy service than a full-service airline, but they do so in the tradition of PSA, trying to provide a comfortable experience that makes people want to choose their airline. The ULCC model, on the other hand, guts out literally every possible feature and then dangles it in front of you on a string, telling you to pay extra if you want it. These airlines do not provide a good experience. There will be no baggage allowances, no extra legroom, and no priority boarding. The base fare, however, is almost absurdly low relative to even low-cost carriers, and as air travel becomes a fact of life more and more the humble ULCC becomes a necessary part of the ecosystem as the only way many people can afford to travel.

Ryanair is technically 38 years old, but it's only been a low-cost carrier since 1990. This pivot is the brainchild of then-CFO, now CEO (and ouster of the eponymous Ryan) Michael O'Leary, one of the wealthiest and most unpleasant men in Ireland.

image: Associated Press Yes, this is actually a real image of the CEO of Ryanair. I imagine this may clear up a thing or two.

Why is Ryanair? Because Michael O'Leary, is the simple answer. Michael O'Leary is - and there is genuinely no better way to describe the man - a troll. If you take David Neeleman's image during his tenure at jetBlue, a sweet everyman trying to improve the experience by sitting in on flights and giving up his salary to employee medical funds, Michael O'Leary is the literal exact opposite of him on every point. A self-described "gobshite" and "obnoxious little bollocks" who has admitted to "not liking" aeroplanes, Michael O'Leary is a cruel, selfish, belligerent, publicity-seeking freakazoid on a mission to piss off everyone in Europe which has so far been largely successful.

I don't want anything I say about the man to come off as positive. Michael O'Leary is a wealthy ghoul (and, yes, he was born wealthy, no rags in his tale) who publicly berates, mistreats, and underpays his staff. He has expressed prejudice against racial and religious minorities, fat and disabled passengers, women, and just about anyone who expects to be treated with some measure of dignity. He has committed legitimate crimes, like impersonating journalists. He denies climate change and has accumulated his massive wealth by abusing the pilots and cabin crew who keep Ryanair adequate. In 2010 Ryanair was named one of the least ethical companies in the world. The fact that he is so absurd as to be hilarious isn't an endorsement or a defense of him.

That said, here is a short, curated list of Michael O'Leary's, and Ryanair's broadly (as their public image is really an extension of his and vice versa) most Ryanair shenanigans:

O'Leary installed a taxicab license plate on his luxury car and driving it in the bus lane to avoid traffic.

Advertisements have taken open and somewhat sneering shots at other major European airlines, like Lufthansa ('bye by Late-hansa'), British Airways ('expensive BAstards'), and the now-defunct Sabena (using a reference to the famous Manneken Pis statue). These have not been simple comparisons but outright name-calling.

One time they advertised sales to 'sunny' vacation destinations, like Norway.

Generally, their advertisements push so many boundaries that they were once found to have committed seven violations of advertising law in just two years, and I'm shocked they didn't begin an ad campaign centring around this dubious achievement.

They frequently misbrand airports way outside of major cities as being in that major city, with the most insane example being "Vienna Bratislava" - yes, Bratislava, the one in Slovakia.

Pilots are forced to pay for simulator checks while cabin crew are forced to pay for uniforms and training. Employees are even forbidden from charging their phones from office sockets, apparently.

Sometimes passengers are forced to carry their own luggage to the planes! Not carryons, luggage.

O'Leary, in a bold move, outright denied that the 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajökull had created a massive cloud of volcanic ash hazardous to airplanes (it very obviously had).

He also said he would like for there to be a recession, since it would let Ryanair keep costs low. He said this in 2008.

One time he said travel agents ("fuckers") should be shot .

O'Leary claimed that Ryanair would begin offering business class, featuring "beds and blowjobs". I'm personally not sure I would want a Ryanair blowjob. That sounds really horrible.

Also, bold coming from an airline with no seatback pockets.

Apparently they tried to get planes delivered with no window shades (though they weren't able to because of regulations).

They've floated the idea of standing seats. I don't believe this will or indeed could ever happen but it definitely is truly dystopian.

Ryanair keeps trying to buy Aer Lingus. They keep failing, and they keep trying. Obviously, everyone in Ireland has a vested interest in making sure this does not happen.

Fundamentally, Ryanair doesn't care. They can and will essentially throw tantrums to get airports to charge them lower operating fees and if they can't get an airport to do this they just won't operate there. It's like negotiating with a seven-year-old. Except that seven-year-old is Europe's largest airline.

They wanted to buy the C919. This isn't, like, a bad thing, it's just really strange for a hardcore Boeing loyalist airline and I can't imagine how it would save them money.

image: Robot8A This is the interior of a Ryanair plane. Note the safety cards attached to the seatbacks due to the lack of pockets, plus additional adverts on the seatbacks and overhead bins like this is a sports match in a massive stadium. It's also just quite ugly.

Fundamentally, Ryanair is just perpetually doing Ryanair things. Why is Ryanair? Because Ryanair is one giant publicity stunt. A couple of people answered my question by referencing the CEO saying he'd like to charge people to use the toilet, and that's sort of true in the sense that he's said he'd like to do this, but he's always been pretty clear that it's a publicity stunt:

Short of committing murder, negative publicity sells more seats than positive publicity.

Like, it's a bit. He's doing a bit. He's 100% in on the joke. For every one of the more particularly insane claims, like charging to use the toilets, he's outright denied it. Even some claims that are pretty borderline are ones he's contradicted at other points. He's a legitimate bigot who's created one of the most nightmarish work environments out there and just wants to suck money out of people by any means necessary, and he's indefensible, but that's not really what people talk about when they talk about Ryanair. They talk about charging for toilets.

Charging for toilets continues to be the number one story that resurfaces in the press and it’s the gift that keeps on giving. We’ve never done it, but it keeps coming up on social networks every three or four months, the media picks up on it and then someone writes a story on it.

Which I think is misplaced effort when he's also, for instance, a climate change denier who forces disabled passengers to pay for wheelchairs. And I don't believe for a second his climate change denial is based on legitimate convictions - he just doesn't want to have to spend more money. He would absolutely knowingly feed the world into an incinerator if it lowered costs.

Anyway, here is a picture of him having his face violently introduced to a pie.

image: Olivier Hoslet

All of this said, there's no such thing as an ethical airline - he's just playing it up to the extreme for essentially business clickbait.

I feel like the best example of Ryanair's general...Ryanairness is their Twitter account, which I have a sneaking suspicion Michael O'Leary runs himself to save money. It's mostly composed of firing back at complaining customers, Formula 1 opinions, and jabs at everyone from Boris Johnson to the British Museum. (Heartbreaking: the worst person you know just made a great point.) Their description, 'we sell seats, not windows', references the frequent complaints about seat 11A, which does not have a window. (To be fair, their website does warn you about this.) Their weird window situation actually generated my all-time favourite Ryanair tweet.

Here are some other winners.

No, seriously, I think Michael O'Leary might be writing these. I also really don't know how to feel about the fact that it appears someone at the airline - potentially O'Leary himself - has made an edit of a yassified Ryanair plane.

But at the end of the day, it's Ryanair. O'Leary himself has described aeroplanes as "a bus with wings on". As one individual tweeted,

THANK YOU to [Ryanair], for letting me see Europe for Feck All

and that's why I do think I genuinely have primarily positive feelings about Ryanair as a product rather than a company - you truly do see Europe for Feck All. (O'Leary has claimed both that he would introduce $10 transatlantic tickets to the US, and that he would make tickets literally free and make all profits from ancillary fees - while neither has yet happened, it takes one hell of an airline to claim that it's on the table.)

Ryanair isn't affordable, it's dime store. It's an airline you bought from Wish.com. It's the free pen you stole from a cup of identical pens at the bank which stops working within days. You're not just in steerage, you're on a tramp steamer. You get exactly the misery you pay for, and you go from one place to a different place.

And it's worth noting that Ryanair has at least one positive feature - safety.

When I ran my first questionnaire I asked respondents what type of airline they thought was most dangerous. Other than what's shown there was also an option for mainline full service carriers; unsurprisingly, nobody chose this. There were 50 respondents but 5 declined to answer this particular question, so the sample size isn't really significant enough to draw any conclusions from, but it's what I have. (I kind of wish I could stop to re-run this with my current follower count, but this post is actually a request. No, not for my wonderful beloved followers - for my dentist. Not joking. Thank you for making my teeth not have holes in them.)

20% of respondents indicated that low-cost or ultra-low-cost airlines probably had the worst safety records and practices. It's completely understandable why someone would think this, but without going into the actual statistics of plane crashes this simply isn't true, and in fact they're the safest category on here. While it obviously depends on the specific airline, low-cost carriers as a category are no less safe than mainline carriers. This is despite the fact that they tend to fly shorter flights and thus they operate more takeoffs and landings, which are the points in a flight where the majority of crashes occur.

How does that make sense? Well, part of it is that the airline industry has gotten very close to eliminating accidental crashes via innovations in technology and an incredible safety culture built on years of hard lessons. The world has paid in blood for crew resource management and GPWS, but it has paid, and now the sorts of crashes that would have been unremarkable just 20 years ago are completely unthinkable. Actually, in the 2010s it's quite possible more people were killed by planes brought down deliberately than accidents. But beyond that, the costs low-cost airlines cut tend to be ones that aren't safety-critical. They tend to operate shiny new fleets (better fuel efficiency, purchased in bulk) with large maintenance teams (shorter turnaround and less planes grounded for long periods of time) at less congested airports (lower operating fees) and indeed when I think about famous accidents that involve massive cutting of corners it's nearly always full-service airlines, save for egregious examples of low-cost industry pariahs out of business within a few years. Focusing on eliminating operating costs by making the passenger experience cramped and miserable allows for pouring all your budget into running a smooth and well-oiled operation.

The axiom "if you think safety is expensive, try a crash" is often attributed to EasyJet founder Stelios Haji-Ioannou. And it's true. Beyond the cost of writing off a plane, of financial compensation to survivors and families, of lawyers and PR, of having to update your operation to make sure it never happens again...as O'Leary himself said, all press is good press...short of murder. A heinous, clearly negligent crash, on the other hand, can kill an airline as easily as it can kill people. It has done in the past and that threat will never stop being there. Airlines go out of business all the time for any number of mundane financial reasons. In many cases margins simply do not allow for something like a crash. Crashes have even ended the lives of deeply historic, beloved, well-established nationalized flag carriers, so this particular sword of Damocles could cut Ryanair's control cables just as easily. And they've managed to avoid this fate, with zero passenger fatalities and only one written-off airplane - the 2008 crash of flight 4102, caused by a birdstrike during landing.

And I'll be honest, "miserable and safe but a tenth the price of a train ticket from Boston to New York" (I am unfortunately not exaggerating) is a pretty appealing package to my non-millionaire self.

...so why do their planes look like this? I'm dead serious, it vexes me. I don't know what to make of this. Hey, did you remember I'm an airline livery review blog? Look, I can't help myself. Low-cost carriers as a topic, and how they're viewed, is probably the most interesting facet of the aviation industry to me. I feel like if I had infinite time and resources I might genuinely sit down, hit the databases and archives, run a few studies, and write a book about it - it's fascinating, and low-cost carriers are something that only economists and businesspeople seem to want to talk about. I think it's about time someone approached them through a lens of history and social psychology. There's not really academic value to what I do here, on Runway Runway, my tumblr blog where I call Lufthansa planes ugly, but if something doesn't exist I will create it even if my sample size is 50.

So how about how they're literally viewed - like, what their planes look like? Well, here are some low cost carriers I've reviewed. Notice something? They're bright and eye-catching. They don't take themselves too seriously. They're fun. The original low-cost carrier literally painted big smiles on their bright pink and orange planes.

Okay, yes, they don't all look like this. WestJet and IndiGo, for example, are fairly normal-looking. And there are full-service carriers like TAP Air Portugal (and condor. Absolutely condor.) that I would say have a pretty low-costy look to them. There is nothing wrong with that. Low-cost liveries are frequently colourful and exciting, with much more thought put into distinctiveness and charm instead of a passionless appeal to dignity. Indeed a lot of my most highly esteemed liveries, including all the ones pictured above, are low-cost airlines. GOL, for example, is a snappy, eye-catchy design in bright colours that's clearly not meant to look expensive. The same goes for Breeze Airways. There's even more examples out there I've yet to touch on, like EasyJet; ValuJet; Scoot; Spirit Airlines; Frontier Airlines; PLAY (and the late WOW air); Volotea; airasia, so on - to be dignified or clean is not the goal here. Even the names of low-cost carriers frequently are very hastily stapled together and generic, like EasyJet or Super Air Jet or Wings Air; JetSmart; SkyUp; Smartwings; FastJet; Sky Airline (just one!); MYAirlines; the classic ValuJet; flyadeal; and the legendary jet2.com, making no attempt at all to seem as if they have a legacy to fall back on. And there's even more out-there specimens, like Mango or even Nok Air. Many of them have specific themes, like Batik Air, Tigerair, or Buzz, which isn't something you see on full-service carriers, which brand themselves on national identity and the promise of luxury and good service - which is boring. Low-cost airlines, if they want to succeed, have to do something to make people remember they exist.

This is the fundamental shape taken by the low-cost product, which operates with few laurels to rest on and a mission of getting people to remember their website at any cost. Much like a can of Arizona iced "tea" guaranteed to cost ninety-nine cents, literally cheaper than a bottle of water, the package it comes in makes no attempt to look classy. And I am a heavy tea drinker who considers myself fairly discerning, whose favourite type of tea is gyokuro yamashiro (which is absurdly expensive), but you literally can't beat Arizona! It's potable and it's ninety-nine cents and it sort of resembles tea if you don't think too much about it and Massachusetts summers are surprisingly hot and the can is pretty and colourful. Sure, I'd rather have Ito En, but that costs normal money and Arizona costs 99 cents, and sometimes that's all I really have, and it gets the job done even if my teeth aren't enjoying the experience. A Wizz Air plane is a can of Arizona iced tea. It is ninety-nine cents and potable.

This isn't Arizona, this is a box of Darjeeling from Harrods. Ryanair outfits their fleet in handsome navy blue and gold. Their logo, an outline of a woman with harp-like wings taking flight, is simple yet elegant, and that feels so very wrong. I actually asked in my questionnaire what the colours of the Ryanair livery were, because I had seen people expressing casually that they weren't sure they could recognize so much as a Ryanair logo, and the results aren't worth showing in a chart because they're basically as good as random. I do want to specifically appreciate the person who answered "I don't remember but it must be whatever the cheapest colour of airplane paint is", though.

But the truth is that they have such a rich palette, and I do mean that in the sense of 'wealthy'. A deep royal blue paired with a saturated gold used as a sparing trim, these are the colours of an overstuffed plush armchair, not a budget airline. Aside from the name on the winglets and the giant billboard wordmark there is nothing, and I mean nothing, that is typical for a low-cost airline. This is not garish advertising, this is stately.

The layout itself is what I call "Deltalike". Delta certainly did not invent this style of livery but they are the carrier I associate most with it, likely due to the fact that I live right by one of their hubs. The Deltalike is a white plane with a painted tail unconnected to the main fuselage body, painted winglets, painted engines, and a painted underbelly large enough still be visible when viewed directly from the side. While a 'true' Deltalike uses a consistent palette for the engines, tail, and underbelly, there is significant variation. The detached tail is, in my opinion, the harbinger of the Deltalike, and I call liveries with an incomplete presentation of Deltalike features Deltalites.

This scheme is not as common as the Lufthansa Line variants but it is still very common, with its popularity probably peaking in the 2010s. Some examples of the true Deltalike include Air Canada, 2006 Icelandair, Azul, the old GOL livery, and jetBlue. Some colour-varied Deltalikes are the old Flair livery, the SAS red engine livery, and British Airways. An example Deltalite is the old Croatia Airlines scheme, which has a painted tail and belly and engines that are sort of painted. Sure, the engines are just grey and a bit of the tail extends onto the body, but it's got the colour concentrated in the right place and it has the painted belly, it's a Deltalite. A lot of liveries have painted engines and detached tails but no painted bellies, and I do consider these to be on the far end of the Deltalike spectrum, but they aren't what I mean when I refer to a Deltalike. They're what brown dwarves are to actual stars - related but not really the same.

Ryanair is a true Deltalike, but I would even call it an elevated Deltalike. The gold trim, like the cord adorning the hems a of a thick brocade smoking jacket, has an effortlessly shallow curve as it trims the rich blue underbelly, larger than that of a typical Deltalike and with a very deliberate shape to it which at the rearmost point covers half the fuselage by height but fades away to a sort of goatee at the front. This is not a plane which sat in a puddle of blue but an intentional cloak impeccably positioned, visible not just from the side but from the front. The engines, instead of being plain or just one colour with a website printed on, large and garish, are the same white and blue with yellow trim, the last traces of the setting sun melting into a glassy deep blue ocean below a stark white sky with which it inexplicably coexists. Sure, the detached tail still looks bad, it always does, but you can ignore it at most angles.

From below the dark blue creates that distinct cetacean effect, a certain brightness-inverted countershading effect, similar to what you see on airlines like KLM and other blue-side-up liveries. The underside doesn't have a huge, legible logo, visible even from the ground on final approach. One of the defining features of the low-cost livery, in my mind, is a large, prominent website. It's tacky and a little pointless (I mean, surely they can Google your airline's name if your wordmark is large enough) but it is downright ubiquitous. Even full-service carriers frequently heavily feature their website, but it's nowhere on a Ryanair plane. That's so, so incredibly weird.

Just...think about it. Their entire identity is outrage marketing. They are the xQc of airlines - bigoted, constantly in the news, and obnoxious. And nobody remembers what their livery looks like because it doesn't look obnoxious. This is like if MrBeast's thumbnails were lovingly curated aesthetically pleasing shots of scenery that could pass for screenshots from an actual film. It's not tacky and cheap and it's not generic and cheap, it's elegant and cheap. And of all airlines to look like this...Ryanair? Seriously? Ryanair?

image: Associated Press

The CEO.

The airplanes.

Do you see what I mean? Do you see why I find this deeply strange? This is not a clickbait plane. This plane is downright unclickable. It has never been clicked. I bet if I covered the name up and showed it to people (again, I wish I'd had the time to do this) I could fool people into thinking this is like United. Hell, I've learned from my other survey that the average person clearly knows less about liveries than I, the Joker of liveries, do, and can't identify basically any from memory. I could probably fool at least one or two people into thinking this is Singapore Airlines. I may try this on a few co-workers and then get back to you.

How did we get here? I have no clue. While Ryanair did start out as a charter carrier rather than a low-cost airline, and they always had blue and yellow as their colours, their very early liveries were just white planes with wordmarks.

This livery seems to have appeared very early in the history of low-cost Ryanair. Unfortunately, I can't date it precisely - the only thing I can say is that the earliest photograph I could find in this livery was from 1994. Based on the fact that their planes were photographed in different liveries right up to then, including this very brief TAM-like BAC 1-11 livery, I think 1994 is most likely the point they committed to it.

Oh, Adam Rowden, what a different world you lived in.

Even for 1994 this is a pretty conservative livery. Sure, this was before the real boom of bright and venomous flying billboards, but it's still strange. And Ryanair is no stranger to literal flying billboards in the form of logojets for such companies as Vodafone and Hertz, often sort of hideous ones, though I imagine these days nobody would ever want to associate with them like that.

And they never changed it, except that they did - to the modern, softer curve. This I can pinpoint with much more accuracy. It was changed in mid-2003 as new aircraft were delivered, while the older livery was phased out together with the secondhand airframes which wore it. I do not understand this at all. If any airline were to just make the decision to go full circus tent and be as garish as possible it should be Ryanair, right? Ryanair is a brand incapable of cowardly behavior. But they look far more sober than even the average modern flag carrier livery. I guess they don't think they need an eye-catching livery, but I just don't buy that as a full explanation. Imagine the news they'd make for introducing something truly heinous. I think their genuine best move would just be to put a huge picture of Michael O'Leary's face, blown up massively and poorly aligned with visible JPEG artefacts, all over their fuselages. All of Europe would be furious. So why? Why is this the situation?

So what's the verdict? This may be the hardest decision I've made so far. The options here range widely. I'll lay them out.

If I were rating this based on pure visual appeal, I would give it a B-. I am dead serious - this is a visually pleasing, well-balanced livery, simple yet elegant. The detached tail is my only major complaint. But I think Saudia's planes are quite pretty and I graded them low because I think they fail at representing their airline or having a distinct identity, so this cannot be my sole criterion.

I almost want to give them an F because of just how un-Ryanair they are, like how Copa's livery is literally not the Copa livery, but that feels wrong because that's still the Ryanair livery, it's not just a refusal to design a livery at all.

Do I marry these two into a tepid union destined for either divorce or a dramatic act of arson after a seeming eternity of languishing in mutual dysfunction in Tallahassee? I really don't want to do that, because attempting to balance these factors betrays the fact of their contradiction, the mental strain I've been afflicted with over this simple, pointless choice with zero consequences except maybe one of my followers disagreeing with me, which is fine. Unlike certain individuals I will not call you swear words and say you're an idiot.

The final option is maybe my least favourite of them all, because it's capitulation. It's admitting Ryanair is special, just the most annoying golf-ball-sized hailstone in the blizzard of absurd and comical frustrations which is the airline industry. But I just don't know what to make of this miserable little pest, this plague on the patience and knees of the traveling public.

Z. FUCK YOU IT'S RYANAIR.

It defies categories by being good, but being Ryanair. I hate that. I hate it, I hate their beastly little CEO, and I dislike that their planes are sleek, elegant, and could easily pass for an airline that doesn't instruct stewardesses to kick their passengers' shins as they walk down the aisles. If I am buying a ten-euro plane ticket I do not think the plane should look like this, teleologically speaking. At the end of the day I just have no better way to quantify my feelings.

Prick.

#tarmac fashion week #grade: z #era: 1990s #era: 2000s #era: 2010s #era: 2020s #region: europe #ryanair #low cost carriers #ulccs #deltalike #cabin fever #long haul #questionnaire 1 #questionnaires #double sunrise #yeah I guess. it goes in that tag sure

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