In March 2019, CNN Travel published a detailed feature on the Pan Am Experience, the 1970s-style Boeing 747 dinner flight that Talaat Captan co-founded with Anthony Toth in 2014. Written by travel journalist Matt Villano, the piece followed an evening on board from check-in to the final fashion show, and explained how a collector’s homemade cabin set ended up at Air Hollywood, Captan’s aviation-themed film studio in Los Angeles. Here is our summary of that article, with some context on how the story has developed since.
A flight that never leaves the ground
CNN described the Pan Am Experience as part re-enactment, part dinner theater and part memorabilia showcase. The goal is to recreate what it felt like to fly a 747 with one of the world’s best-loved airlines, long before Pan Am’s shutdown in 1991. The article noted that guests often book months ahead and that the event was approaching its fifth anniversary, growing more elaborate each year with more authentic props, developed characters and an expanded uniform collection.
Captan summed up the appeal by pointing to an old saying about travel: it’s not the destination but the journey that’s important.
In his view, guests come to travel somewhere without going anywhere, and the journey itself is the product.
Check-in, boarding and a three-class cabin
The feature walked readers through the evening step by step. Guests arrive on a red carpet at the studio in Pacoima, a Los Angeles neighborhood near Burbank, and enter a space dressed as a 1960s airline terminal, complete with ticket counters and a replica Pan Am desk. Captan himself was at that desk on the night CNN visited, handing out paper boarding passes modeled on the originals.
After drinks in a lounge furnished with pieces built from old aircraft parts, a crackling announcement calls the flight crew to the counter. Toth, in the role of captain, leads a team of costumed flight attendants up a jet bridge to the cabin. Guests are seated in one of three sections: Clipper Class (Pan Am’s original business class), First Class, or the Upper Deck Lounge.
A menu and service from the 1970s
CNN spent much of the article on the food and service, because that is where the show’s attention to detail is most visible. Flight attendants hand out magazines, take drink orders and bring hot towels, scented to match fragrances the airline once used. Upper Deck guests start with caviar; everyone else chooses between shrimp cocktail and a caprese salad. The main course is chateaubriand carved in the aisle or roast chicken, with a vegetarian pasta option, followed by wine and cheese, cognac, coffee and dessert.
Between courses come trivia and three fashion shows of flight attendant uniforms from the late 1960s through the 1980s and from airlines around the world. The article reported that the collection behind those shows is one of the largest of its kind anywhere.
Details that make it feel real
According to CNN, Toth and Captan spared no expense on authenticity. The seatbelt buckles are originals, the table flowers follow 1970s cabin arrangements, period drinks such as Harvey Wallbangers and Tab are on the menu, and the seat fabrics and the needlepoint “nose wall” at the front of First Class reproduce designs from the era. For former Pan Am crew members and their families, the article noted, these small touches serve as a direct link to their own past, and one former flight attendant told CNN the cabin brought her memories back to life.
That same attention to period detail runs through Captan’s wider work. Air Hollywood began as a place to give film and television productions realistic aircraft interiors, a story we tell in How Talaat Captan Turned a Ground Control Setback into Air Hollywood, and the same instinct for realism made the studio a natural home for Toth’s cabin.
How the partnership began
CNN called the Pan Am Experience Toth’s brainchild. A lifelong aviation enthusiast, he bought his first pair of airplane seats as a teenager and later collected parts from aircraft boneyards in the Mojave Desert, eventually building a two-level Pan Am cabin set in his garage and then a storage unit.
Around 2014, mutual friends introduced Toth to Captan, who had heard about the set and wanted to see it in person. The article reported that Captan, a longtime movie producer, came up with the idea of using the set to host an event. A trial dinner offered at an aviation memorabilia collectors’ show sold out within minutes, demand kept growing, and later that year Captan moved the set into Air Hollywood, where it became a regular attraction.
At the time of the article, the experience ran on Saturday evenings, with about half the dates open to the public and tickets sold in pairs according to seating class. The article also mentioned the partners’ hopes for a Las Vegas location, with possible additions such as simulated turbulence, more seats and a public bar and gift shop. That plan had first been reported in 2017, and we covered it in our summary of the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s coverage.
Why the coverage still matters
The CNN feature is one of the most complete outside descriptions of what the Pan Am Experience offers, and it captured the event as it reached five years of operation. It also shows how a niche idea, a single dinner in a collector’s replica cabin, grew into a recognized attraction. The event industry noticed the same thing: BizBash named Captan one of its 2015 Event Innovators.
Captan’s connection to the Pan Am name has deepened since. He is now one of four executives working to revive Pan American World Airways, as described in our post on the Pan Am leadership team and in our summary of the Orange County Business Journal’s report on the revival.
To learn more about the experience, visit the founder page on the Pan Am Experience website, read more about Talaat Captan, or see all coverage on the Press page.
