The American movie that launched in-flight entertainment
In our blissfully technological modern times, it is easy to take in-flight feature films for granted during a long-distance flight. While most passengers don’t look forward to the selection involving tired American comedies and other streaming favourites, the history of in-flight entertainment is actually quite fascinating.
What now feels like a modest distraction was once an emblem of progress. Early aviation was sold not merely as transportation but as spectacle, and the addition of cinema only heightened that sense of wonder. To watch moving images while suspended thousands of feet above the earth must have felt like science fiction layered upon science fiction.
According to the surviving records from various newspapers and airlines, one of the earliest examples of in-flight films was the 1921 short documentary Howdy Chicago! It was a promotional video about the city, but the subject of the film didn’t matter at all since its historical value lay in the achievement itself.
A 1921 report from Aerial Age magazine noted: “Before the flight, it was feared that the vibration of the giant hydroplane as it shot through at 90 miles an hour would seriously interfere with the screening. But it did not. This historic flight demonstrated the practicability of movie entertainment for transatlantic aerial commuters in the days to come.”
The 1921 experiments were noteworthy, but more importantly, they paved the way for the Imperial Airways flights a few years later. In 1925, the airline decided that it was going to screen an entire major Hollywood feature to push the boundaries of in-flight entertainment.
In-flight features might seem banal for modern viewers who are used to the comforts of technological advancements and streaming platforms. However, a century ago, it was an unimaginable novelty for passengers who really thought that the future had finally arrived.
Context is everything when assessing these early screenings. Air travel itself was still a daring enterprise, associated more with adventure than routine commuting. To combine that fragile, roaring machinery with the flicker of a silent epic was to collapse two modern miracles into a single experience.
While there might have been short films screened on flights before the Howdy Chicago! trials, a 1925 silent film titled The Lost World became the first in-flight feature in history. It was a major Hollywood sci-fi production based on Arthur Conan Doyle’s eponymous novel.
The film stars Wallace Beery as the famous Professor Challenger, who leads an expedition to South America, eventually discovering incredible anachronisms such as dinosaurs and humanity’s ape ancestors. During that period, film stock was highly flammable, which is why it was risky to have the screening on a converted World War One bomber, but the Arthur Conan Doyle adaptation ended up making history.
