Talaat Captan’s Air Hollywood was the subject of a photo feature by the aviation news site AirlineGeeks. In “Inside Hollywood’s Go-To Airline,” published on August 5, 2019, Albert Kuan took readers through the studio’s cabins, cockpits and airport sets in Pacoima and explained how a film producer’s frustration turned into a full-time business building aircraft for the camera. Here is a summary of what the piece covered.
How the studio began
Kuan describes Captan as a film industry veteran and a keen aviation enthusiast. The article traces Air Hollywood back to the production of Ground Control, the airport disaster film Captan worked on in the late 1990s. Permission to shoot at LAX was withdrawn at the last minute, and the production had to move to other locations, including Ontario Airport. That experience convinced Captan that productions needed sets they could control, and he founded Air Hollywood in 1998.
The article adds a point that shaped the business in the years that followed: after September 11, 2001, filming at airports and around aircraft became far more difficult, which made studio-built sets even more valuable to filmmakers. The longer version of the origin story is told on this site in How Talaat Captan Turned a Ground Control Setback into Air Hollywood.
What AirlineGeeks saw on the tour
As a photo feature, the piece focuses on the sets themselves. Kuan’s tour included:
- A narrow-body cabin built from an actual Boeing 737, the kind of generic interior that many productions choose because it can stand in for almost any airline.
- A Boeing 767 set and a mock 1970s Pan Am 747 cabin, complete with an upper-deck lounge.
- An airport jet bridge, cockpits and rows of aircraft seats.
- Flight attendant uniforms, safety cards and a prop department with items such as seatbelts and flight recorders available for hire.
The article stresses that the sets are reconfigurable, so one cabin can be dressed and rearranged to suit very different films. Much of that set dressing now sits within Air Hollywood Props, the prop house Captan built from the aircraft parts he collected.
Productions and clients
AirlineGeeks listed several productions that used Air Hollywood’s sets, among them the feature films Bridesmaids and The Wolf of Wall Street and the television series Grey’s Anatomy, all of which also appear on the studio’s own list of productions. The article also noted the studio’s Pan Am 747 cabin work for Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Not every client is a film studio. According to the article, Captan said airlines themselves come to Air Hollywood to shoot safety videos and television commercials, which says a lot about how convincing the sets are.
The AutoPlane
Kuan also highlighted the AutoPlane, Air Hollywood’s portable cabin. He described it as a 53-foot airplane mock-up that ships in a container and can be assembled in about two hours, so productions that cannot come to Los Angeles can still get a realistic cabin on location. The same set was featured again in a 2026 article from the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.
Beyond film and television
The piece closed with the programs that use Air Hollywood’s sets for the public rather than for cameras:
- A regular retro Pan Am dining experience, which recreates 1970s air travel on the 747 set.
- Open Sky for Autism, a free program that helps families of children with autism prepare for air travel. See Open Sky for Autism: How Talaat Captan’s Mock Flights Help Families Prepare to Fly.
- Flight simulations with turbulence and landings for nervous fliers, a program covered in Talaat Captan’s FearlessFlight. The article noted that the simulations have been used for dogs as well as people.
Kuan also reported that the company had expanded beyond Los Angeles with facilities elsewhere, including Atlanta.
Why the piece is worth reading
Much of the coverage of Air Hollywood focuses on a single program. The AirlineGeeks feature is useful because it shows the whole operation in one place, from the 737 cabin used in everyday productions to the community programs, and it explains in plain terms why a dedicated aviation studio exists at all. For aviation fans, the photographs are the main attraction.
More coverage of Talaat Captan’s work is collected on the Press page.
