Virgin America

» see virginamerica.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

American law says a foreign national cannot control a US airline, and the Department of Transportation spent nearly three years deciding whether Virgin America was really American enough to fly. Virgin Group ended up with a capped voting stake, Richard Branson signed away operational control on paper, and the airline finally took off on 8 August 2007 out of San Francisco. Legally it was a licensing arrangement with a foreign-ownership rulebook wrapped around it, and it was headquartered in Burlingame, twenty minutes from the runway it was built to use.

What it actually sold was the inside of the airplane. Mood lighting in purple and pink, and a touchscreen system called Red in every seatback that ran a moving map, played music, took your food order and let you message the passenger in 14C. Fleet-wide wifi arrived in May 2009, before any other American carrier had it everywhere. The fleet was all Airbus narrowbodies and the network was thin by design, mostly transcontinental and West Coast.

Readers of travel magazines voted it the best airline in the country nine years running. Its finances did not agree. It ran at a loss through most of its life, posted a first full-year profit in 2013, went public in November 2014, and was sold inside eighteen months of that. The cabin that made it beloved cost more per seat than the fares it was charging for those seats.

~ the record ~

~ the cabin ~

Red is the part worth recording because it was a piece of consumer software shipped into a seatback in 2007, which is the same year the iPhone arrived. Early versions ran on a Linux stack with a touchscreen GUI nobody had asked an airline for, and the 2015 refresh moved it onto Android displays. You could buy a sandwich at 35,000 feet without flagging anybody down, and the seat-to-seat chat was used exactly the way you would expect people to use an anonymous message box in a metal tube.

The lighting is the other half. Cabins were lit in shifting purples that went down to a deep glow at night, and it reads now as the moment when airline interiors started being art-directed rather than specified. Alaska kept some of those cabins flying for years after the name was gone and travelers learned to check the aircraft registration to find one.

~ the safety video ~

In October 2013 the airline released a safety briefing directed by Jon M. Chu, performed as a full song-and-dance number with people off American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance. It passed a million and a half views on YouTube inside a day and went on past eight million. Airlines had done jokey safety videos before, and this one was the one that made the format standard, to the point that Air New Zealand and Delta were competing on it within two years.

That video is the only part of this airline that ever reached Turkey. Virgin America flew domestic American routes and a handful into Mexico, and never once crossed an ocean, so from where I sit it was an airline you could only watch. That is its own kind of product history: for most of the world outside the United States, Virgin America existed entirely as a four-minute clip that circulated on the internet for a few weeks in 2013.

~ what alaska kept ~

Alaska announced the purchase on 4 April 2016 at $2.6 billion, having outbid JetBlue, and closed it on 14 December 2016. In March 2017 it confirmed the Virgin America name would go. The two carriers came under a single operating certificate on 11 January 2018, and the last revenue flight under the old code, VX1948 from San Francisco to Los Angeles, landed on the evening of 24 April 2018. The brand was formally gone at midnight.

Alaska got what it was buying, which was San Francisco and Los Angeles gate capacity plus a customer base on the West Coast. The purple lighting was removed as the cabins were refitted, the last of the Virgin America interiors came out of service in 2023, and the Airbus fleet was eventually retired in favor of an all-Boeing operation. Branson wrote a public note on the day the deal closed saying he had no way to stop it, since the structure that let the airline exist at all was the same structure that left him without a vote.

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