Delta’s Sky Magazine Closes for Good
Meg Butler March 31, 2020
Sky Magazine, Delta’s in-flight magazine since 2009, has shuttered for good.
It seems like such a minor thing among all that’s happening, but just a heads up that the Delta Sky magazine team (including me) has been laid off and the mag is no more. I was deputy editor there; it was such a great job and a truly wonderful team. I will miss it ✈️ 💔📔
— Dana Raidt (@dana_darko) March 30, 2020
The layoffs were spotted on Twitter by View From the Wing‘s Gary Leff. As of this article’s publication time, there is no mention of the layoffs on Delta Sky magazine’s website.
Unfortunately for Delta Sky magazine’s employees, they are contract staff. Consequently, the bailout stipulation requiring airlines not to lay off employees until October 1 doesn’t apply here.
Sky Magazine was always jammed with advertising so I'm surprised it would not have been profitable. And that's really the ultimate decision about any advertising medium; did it make a profit.
Enjoy reading it.
Each of those magazines weights, maybe 1 pound? On the average 737, at least 150 of them on each plane. That's 150 pounds of dead wight being flown around the country for how many hours, every day, per plane. That never made a lot of sense to me. But in the long run, probably doesn't make that much difference. Flying Korean Air, I was surprises to see how large a stack of magazines they had. Must have been 3-5 pounds of paper in every seat back between the duty free catalog and multiple magazines in different languages. On a 777, with almost 300 seats, that's probably close to 1000 pounds routinely being flown back and forth across the Pacific in the air for 12 hours a day, per flight. There's gotta be some measurable amount of jet fuel wasted on that, I'm sure Boeing would go to create costs to cut that much weight off every plane if they could.
I am actually surprised that it was not stopped long ago. The content used to be better but not much anymore. Most people were not reading it so it became dead weight.
Read every airline mag cover to cover and so did my wife. Will not bother with electronic versions.