Vern Alg is an airline industry and cabin interiors stalwart; he first caught the airline bug 47 years ago and hasn’t looked back since. His early career saw him gain invaluable insights into how airlines operate – starting out as an aircraft cleaner followed by working his way up through loading baggage, ticketing, gates, and catering before moving into station management and finally on to corporate.
He joined Continental Airlines via its New York Air subsidiary. At Continental, he sat next to the COO during the integration of People Express, Frontier, and New York Air. This was followed by a term (as in prison) heading up the crew scheduling and crew planning organization.
But Vern Alg found his true passion in 1990 when he got involved with aircraft interiors. At that time he organised Continental’s Project Management group, which gained a lot of visibility working on cabin interior projects. He was chosen to manage the aircraft modification side of a revolutionary new product called BusinessFirst, which introduced the First Class product at a Business Class price to legacy carriers. Now everybody does it, but it was leading edge at the time. His team completed the project on Continental’s wide body fleet in just seven months. For more than 20 years, his passion has impacted the development of aircraft interiors up to and including being a vocal participant in the 787 customer participation team where Boeing refined their design to make this a revolutionary customer and operator friendly aircraft interior.
Eschewing retirement, Vern Alg now works as an independent consultant to the industry. This role covers being Reed Exhibition’s Aircraft Interiors Industry Consultant as well as projects for airlines, OEMs, and supply chain companies. In his leisure time, he is a “voyageur extraordinaire” – travelling the world, meeting new friends and occasionally adding to his eclectic motorbike collection (17 so far, and counting).