Originally Posted by
DuncanDoenitz
I'm of an age were I can remember those magnificent cutaway drawings in the Eagle boys' paper which dropped through the letterbox every Wednesday. The future would apparently be filled with airliners of increasing size and levels of comfort. Two ubiquitous features on all of these projects, apparently, would be a walk-up bar and a grand piano in the spacious first-class lounge.
In the early days of the 747, DC-10, and L1011, the operators couldn't regularly fill the larger aircraft, so they
did have first class lounges, walk up bars, and a special light weight piano was designed for the 747 upper deck lounge. However over the following years two, things changed: first, deregulation started taking hold, so airlines could start charging less for ticket, which meant that more people could afford to start flying so load factors went up and they could fill the seats that soon replaced the lounges.