Collecting safety cards: airsickness bags, boarding passes and menus as an airline archive

They sit in every seat pocket, get skimmed briefly at boarding and end up in the recycling after the flight: safety cards, airsickness bags, boarding passes, menus. For many aviation fans, these very papers are an archive of airline history in their own right. Collecting safety cards means having aircraft types, cabin versions, designs and entire eras in a single binder. This guide shows you which collecting fields exist, where legal pieces come from, how to store and organize them and what you absolutely have to watch out for when sharing boarding passes.

Airline collectibles: the short answer

What gets collected are mainly paper items and small pieces from the cabin: safety cards, unused airsickness bags, boarding passes, menu and drinks cards, plus inflight magazines, timetables, luggage tags and kids’ giveaways. Their appeal lies in being tied to an airline, an aircraft type and a period. The most important rule up front: anything that belongs to the safety equipment stays on the aircraft. You get originals through trades, collectors’ swap meets, estates and dealers – not from the seat pocket.

The collecting fields at a glance

Not every piece of cabin paper is equally exciting, and not every one is equally easy to get. The table shows the common fields with their quirks.

Collectible	What it documents	Sourcing	Storage	Special feature
Safety card	Airline, aircraft type, cabin version, issue status	Trades, swap meets, dealers, estates	flat in sleeves, binder or box	must not be taken from the aircraft
Airsickness bag (unused)	Airline design, advertising, special motifs	ask on board, trades	flat, dry, sorted in sleeves	huge variety, affordable entry
Boarding pass	Route, date, airline, printing method	your own flights, estates	album with pockets	mind privacy when showing
Menu and drinks card	Service, class, route, era	your own flights (often meant to be taken), swap meets	flat, protected from light	long-haul and premium cards especially sought after
Inflight magazine, timetable	Route network, fleet, advertising, zeitgeist	your own flights, swap meets, antiquarian bookshops	upright in archive boxes	fleet overviews as period documents

If you already collect other cabin souvenirs, you know the principle from amenity kits: small objects handed out in large numbers are often unspectacular individually – but read as a series, they tell an airline’s story.

Safety cards: type knowledge on a single sheet

The safety card is the most demanding and, for many spotters, the most exciting collecting field, because it is so closely tied to the aircraft. It complements the crew’s verbal safety briefing and shows emergency exits, slides, oxygen masks, life vests and the brace position. For scheduled flights, the US aviation authority FAA expressly requires that the cards contain information only for the type and model of aircraft in use; Europe has comparable requirements for passenger information. For you as a collector, that means: every card is proof of a type.

What you can read from a card

• Aircraft type and version: A card for the Boeing 737-800 clearly differs from one for an Airbus A320 – the number and position of overwing exits, slides and doors are different. Even within one type there are variants depending on seating.
• Issue status: Many cards carry a print or revision date. This lets you trace cabin refits and fleet changes.
• Design era: Typeface, colors and illustration style reflect the respective brand world. When an airline changes its look, its cards usually change too – much like with a livery change.
• Imagery: Safety cards deliberately rely on drawings rather than text, so that passengers understand them regardless of language and reading ability. Comparing the pictograms across decades is a small research field of its own.

Cards for the great icons are especially appealing. A card for the Boeing 747-400 shows the upper deck with its own exits, and a Concorde card is a rare piece simply because of the small fleet. More on the history of the supersonic jet is in the article Concorde history.

Airsickness bags: the underrated entry point

At first glance, airsickness bags look like a joke, but they are one of the most varied collecting fields there is. The plastic-coated bag as we know it today was developed in 1949 by the American Gilmore Schjeldahl for Northwest Orient Airlines – the historic Northwest Airlines. Since then, material, format and printing have varied widely by airline and era – and that is exactly where the variety that attracts collectors comes from.

The collector scene is bigger than you might think. Guinness World Records listed the Dutchman Niek Vermeulen as record holder with 6,016 different bags (as of January 2010). There are also online museums and databases where collectors catalog their holdings, including a German-language collectors’ database. Some airlines have even turned the bag into a design object: in 2004, Virgin Atlantic had a limited series printed with entries from a design competition.

Why this is a worthwhile way in:

• Light and flat: Hundreds of bags fit in one archive box.
• Cheap: Unused bags are consumables. On request, the crew will often hand over one – ask briefly instead of pocketing a stack.
• Varied: Special motifs, advertising prints, anniversary designs and regional airlines keep supplies coming.
• Easy to trade: Duplicates are a common currency among collectors.

Of course: only unused examples are collected.

Boarding passes: a memento with a data risk

Boarding passes are the most personal collectible, because they almost always come from your own flights. Older examples show how check-in has changed: from hand-filled cards through machine-printed cards with magnetic stripes to today’s two-dimensional barcode. The barcode standard (Bar Coded Boarding Pass, BCBP for short) was published by the airline association IATA in 2005; from 2010, the barcode was mandatory on all boarding passes of the participating airlines. On paper the PDF417 format is mostly used, while on smartphones other codes also appear.

This is exactly where the risk lies. The barcode can contain, among other things, the name, the route and the booking code, and with a surname plus booking code, many airlines let you pull up the booking online. How real this is was shown in 2020 by a well-known case from Australia: a photo of a boarding pass of former prime minister Tony Abbott posted on Instagram was enough to open the booking on the airline’s website.

Menus and inflight magazines: service as a period document

Menu and drinks cards show what an airline served on a particular route and in a particular class. Especially on long-haul flights they are often elaborately designed and expressly meant to be taken – unlike the safety card, you can usually keep them. If in doubt, ask the crew.

Historically especially sought after are cards from the time when flying was still an event: long-haul menus from Pan Am, materials from Swissair or onboard items from the East German airline Interflug, whose history is told in the article Interflug. Inflight magazines and pocket timetables complement such collections with route maps and fleet overviews – a snapshot of the fleet on a particular date that you can later compare with your own sightings.

Where legal collectibles come from

Where airlines themselves offer merchandise and retired material is described in the overview Airline and airport shops. At large events like the ILA Berlin or AERO Friedrichshafen you will often find dealers and collectors with cabin paper. If you’re after larger pieces, you’ll eventually end up at retired aircraft seats.

Storing and organizing: from shoebox to archive

Paper ages. Light bleaches colors, moisture warps cardstock, and plasticizers from cheap sleeves can attack printing inks. With a few rules, your collection stays in good condition for decades.

• Acid-free sleeves: Clear sleeves made of polypropylene or polyester are the standard solution. Avoid PVC sleeves.
• Dark and dry: Binders or archive boxes in living space, not in a damp basement or a hot attic.
• Store flat: Don’t crease or roll cards and menus, and use no rubber bands or adhesive tape.
• Display with care: If you frame cards, choose UV-protective glass and don’t hang them in the sun. You will also find ideas for display in the article Storing and displaying model aircraft.

A two-level logic has proven itself for organizing: first airline, then aircraft type, with safety cards additionally by issue status. In parallel, keep a simple list with airline, type, date or revision status, condition and origin. That lets you spot duplicates for trading, see gaps and link your collection with other lists – such as your list of collected airlines or collected aircraft types.

Many collectors start broad and specialize later: for example on a home airline like Lufthansa, on all cards of one type across different airlines or on historic companies.

Combining collecting and spotting

Cabin paper and spotting complement each other surprisingly well. An airline’s safety card tells you which types it operates; outside at the fence, you see the matching aircraft. If you also collect registrations, you can combine your own flight with boarding pass, safety card and the photo of the aircraft at the gate into a small documentation. And in museums like the Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin or the Flugwerft Schleißheim you can see what historic cabins and their equipment looked like.

Conclusion

Safety cards, airsickness bags, boarding passes and menus are small objects with great expressive power. Safety cards document aircraft types and cabin versions, airsickness bags designs and advertising, boarding passes your own flight history and menus the service of an era. If you source legally, store carefully and organize consistently, you turn them into a real airline archive. And if you’re looking for gift ideas for collectors, you will find more inspiration in Gifts for plane spotters.