air sickness bags

Airline barf bags. The anniversary & the movie

No one wants to get sick on an airplane. But if you feel ill, it’s good to know there’s usually an air sickness bag in the seatback pocket.

And, as there is for most everything, there are people who are serious about collecting (unused) airline barf bags.

This short film includes interviews with some of the world’s air sickness bag collectors. The film also notes that this travel amenity shares its 75th anniversary with Dramamine, a medication designed to combat air sickness that may, some worry, signal the demise of collectible airline barf bag.

From the SFO Museum: Matchbooks & Air Sickness Bags

The SFO Museum at San Francisco International Airport (SFO) has more than 150,000 objects related to the history of commercial aviation and to the airline industry.

As part of its 52 Objects series this year, they’ve pulled out this matchbook showing the route map for Continental Airlines.

Squeezing as much as possible onto a promotional item is nothing new. A while back we found this air sickness bag in the SFO Museum database which could be used for scoring a gin rummy game and/or turning in your film for processing.

Vintage airline air sickness bags

Reading back through the Delta Air Lines blog this week I noticed an entertaining entry from archives manager Marie Force: an airsickness bag from the mid-1960s that has a gin rummy scoreboard on one side:

And an aviation quiz on the other!

That led me to visit the Air Sickness Bag Virtual Museum, of course, where the currently featured airsickness bag is this red number from Virgin Australia.

Unfortunately, I didn’t spend all that much time searching the airsickness bag museum site. But that was because I noticed this poster for sale in the gift shop and spent the rest of the evening trying to clear a spot for it on the living room wall in my house.