American Airlines will discontinue its inflight magazine American Way, the glossy publication that has lining the company’s seatback pockets since 1966.
The Fort Worth-based airline said it will retire the magazine at the end of this month, suggesting it no longer aligns with the entertainment options preferred by travelers. American described the magazine’s death as “bittersweet.”
The magazine’s former editor-in-chief, Adam Pitluk, said the company’s announcement surprises him because the availability of digital inflight entertainment isn’t new. He also said he thinks there’s still a market for American Way.
“For me, it’s pretty unfathomable to think that with a fixed audience, you can’t put forth a product that your passengers want,” Pitluk said.
American isn’t the only airline that’s given up its inflight publication. Southwest Airlines stopped distributing its magazine in March 2020 due to pandemic-related concerns and has no current plans to bring it back, said spokeswoman Brandy King.
United Airlines’ Hemispheres is still in production by American Way’s former publisher, Ink, along with over two dozen other U.S. and international customers, including Amtrak.
American Way was previously produced in-house along with Celebrated Living, which was available in first-class seating, and Nexos, a Spanish and Portuguese language magazine. After the company merged with U.S. Airways in 2013, American slowly phased out the other two magazines before outsourcing production to the London-based Ink in 2015.
The airline’s partnership with Ink will end along with American Way, but some of their previous content will still be available inflight.
Pitluk said taking on his role at American Way wasn’t what he’d expected to be doing in his career, but he saw an opportunity to produce high-quality journalism by leveraging the magazine’s fixed audience. In his nearly decade-long run at the company, Pitluk said the team was able to produce articles that interested the audience, but needed time that major news organizations couldn’t always give.
“We used the (magazine) to basically address not just travel issues, but social issues as well that weren’t adequately explored at that particular moment in time,” Pitluk said.
Pitluk, who now teaches journalism and media at Coastal Carolina University, also said the magazine sometimes served as a direct connection between customers and the airline’s higher-ups. Sometimes readers would email their complaints and comments to the magazine staff, who would then relay it to other employees a few floors above them at the airline’s headquarters.
Despite leaving the magazine over five years ago, Pitluk said he’s been getting calls from former coworkers, including pilots and flight attendants, to talk about its discontinuation. He said employees formed a tight-knit community through their time with the airline and that American Way was a central component of that bond. American acknowledged in its announcement that customers and employees alike hold nostalgia for the publication.
“It was such a unique experience for an airline to be in the publishing business, to publish their own magazine, because it allowed them to have a personal interaction with their passengers,” Pitluk said. “The likes of which no other airline had.”
Despite the magazine’s absence, American Airlines said passengers will have no shortage of entertainment.
This month, the company became the first U.S. airline to bring online learning to passengers through partnerships with Skillshare and Rosetta Stone that provide free educational and language-learning programs. The company has also expanded its collection of video entertainment with over 600 movies and TV shows as well as recorded live music performances and meditation exercises from the software company Calm.
