To celebrate Delta becoming the first airline with travel booking on a social media site (from Facebook), the Delta Museum is now updating and expanding its list of Delta Firsts. 

Check out the list to learn about our industry-leading activities from crop dusting in the early 1920s to early jet service and innovative inflight entertainment. Some of the highlights include:  

• World’s first aerial crop dusting company (as Huff Daland Dusters).
• Early pioneer of the hub-and-spoke system for coordinating flights.
• First airline to introduce three early jets: Douglas DC-8, Convair 880 and the DC-9.
• First airline to offer in-seat power and live broadcast TV programming during flights.

Delta ticket jacket promoting Golden Crown DC-7 service, 1957. 

The list is still a work in progress, so if you think we are missing any Delta “firsts” or have other comments, we would love to hear from you.   

Thank you,  

Marie Force  

Archives Manager

Few airplanes are as iconic as the Boeing 747. No matter how many new airplanes we’ve introduced since the current 747s joined our fleet, customers still love to see those double-deckers pull up to the gate. That’s why all of us on the customer experience team are excited to bring you a complete face-lift for the interiors of our 16 747-400s! These changes are sure to make flying a Delta double-decker an even better experience.

As part of our $1 billion investment in global products and services through 2013, we’ll replace and remake every seat inside the 747s to completely revitalize the flying experience. Between summer 2011 and 2012, we’ll install 48 fully horizontal flat-bed seats in the BusinessElite cabin and 338 new seats in the Economy cabin.

When you walk onboard you’ll immediately discover the new benefits:

• Personal, on-demand entertainment in every seat. In Economy we’ll ditch the old overhead projection systems as we install new seats loaded up with technology. The new seats will be embedded with a nine-inch touch-screen entertainment system (I promise you’ll feel a lot like you’re using your iPhone or iPad!) and will offer access to movie titles, TV shows, digital music tracks, interactive games and a USB port to charge iPods and other electronic devices.
• Added personal space for new comfort in Economy. Each new Economy class seat adds 1.5 inches of additional personal space through a “slimline” design that more efficiently uses cabin space than the older, heavier seats they replace. In addition to the 1.5 inches you’ll find at your knees, your bags also will gain some breathing room with larger under-seat storage space.
• A nearly seven-foot bed to stretch out on in BusinessElite. That’s right, even our tallest customers will be able to fly flat out in these new seats! The new seats are similar to the popular flat-bed product offered on our 777-200LR fleet today but with one notable change – they’ll be configured in a new layout, moving window seats to face the window and center cabin seats to face towards each other for customers flying together. These seats, like our other full-flat products, will all have direct aisle access and also include 120-volt universal power outlets, USB ports and 15.4-inch video monitors.
• Lots of movies, music and games.  The in-flight entertainment server powering all these new seats is big and fast. So big and fast, in fact, that it enables nearly 400 customers to watch 250 different movies, play dozens of different games and listen to 4,000 music tracks on demand all at one time.

You’ll see the first of these revitalized 747s flying as soon as next summer, primarily to and from our Tokyo-Narita hub.

Check out the images of what we’ve designed here. We’re proud of this upgrade and we hope you like the latest in a long list of new Delta product improvements to come!

Mike B.

Customer Experience Team