Gallery: How Delta and Alessi Brought High Design to 30,000 Feet
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Delta this week unveiled a new line of in-flight serviceware by Alessi, the esteemed Italian design house.
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Alessi's Delta collection comprises 86 items, including dishes, cutlery, glassware, ceramics, and meal trays. The range will appear in the airline’s premium cabins beginning April 1.
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Alessi’s in-flight designs are every bit as stunning as the company’s ground-bound wares. But Delta still imposed a number of restrictions on Alessi.
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“It was important that the items look beautiful, but we also had to focus on space and weight reduction,” says Alberto Alessi, the company’s president. Alessi’s designers had to not only improve the form and function of the airline’s existing serviceware, but fit their new collection inside the carrier’s standard-issue service carts.
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By shaving as much weight as possible from ceramics and serving trays (10 and 13 percent, respectively), the company could keep the cutlery, pictured here, relatively hefty. “These are objects the passenger actually picks up—increasing their size and weight gives them a more premium feel,” Alberto Alessi says.
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Alessi manufactured Delta’s plates from bone china instead of stoneware, to make them thinner, and made their shapes more stackable. It even hid little feet on the plates’ undersides, to make them easier to collect after meals.
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Over the course of dozens test flights last year, Delta collected feedback from the people who have to carry all this stuff to your seat. Their input led to several improvements: A subtle, non-slip surface on the meal trays. A new teaspoon that rests stably atop the in-flight saucer, to ease single-handed delivery.
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All of this is great news if you can afford it. But even if you can’t, Alessi’s brilliant designs say a lot about the state of the airline industry—including why your experience at the back of the plane kind of sucks.
