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(CNN) – It’s a Saturday in the outskirts of Los Angeles, and about 50 people are ready to board an airplane for a colorful and memorable journey back to the 1970s.

Compared to most international flights, this one is short — only four hours. And though the flight will transport everyone on the passenger list to another place and time, it logs a whopping total of zero air miles, as it never actually leaves the ground.

Welcome to the wild and wonderful world of the Pan Am Experience. One-part re-enactment, one-part dinner theater and one-part memorabilia overload, the attraction mixes top-quality food with elaborate detail to recreate what it was like to fly a Boeing 747 with one of the world’s most beloved airlines long before its bankruptcy and dissolution in 1991.

“People always talk about how it’s not the destination but the journey that’s important,” says Talaat Captan, who co-founded the experience with Anthony Toth back in 2014.

“We believe that. People come to us to travel somewhere and not go anywhere. To them, the value is in the experience.”

This summer marks the five-year anniversary of the attraction, and it has gotten more elaborate every year. Props have become more authentic. Actors have developed characters. There’s also now a fashion show, and the uniforms represent one of the largest collections of vintage flight attendant uniforms anywhere in the world.

The Pan Am Experience is as close as you can get to experiencing Pan Am without engaging in actual time travel, which is why people are so keen to climb aboard they book their seats months in advance.

Cleared for take-off

The experience begins outside a row of warehouse buildings in Pacoima, an L.A. suburb near Burbank. Guests enter from the parking lot on a red carpet and find a studio decked out like a 1960s airplane terminal. In one corner: A series of airline ticket counters, including an exact replica (computer and all) of a Pan Am desk from the era. On the other side: A lounge that comprises circular bars surrounded by stools and furniture made from old airplane parts.

The back of the room is lined with a screen depicting the exterior of a Pan Am 747, circa 1971.

Guests check in at the Pan Am desk with Captan, who gives them paper boarding passes exactly like the originals from back in the day. A gate agent ushers them to the lounge, where drinks are complimentary.

About an hour in, a voice blares over the crackling loudspeaker: “Would the flight crew please report to the ticket counter?”

Without missing a beat, “Captain” Toth and 14 “flight attendants” dressed in vintage garb enter and head to the ticket counter for their “assignments.” Crew members then proceed up a jet bridge toward the plane screen in the back of the studio, open a cabin door and invite guests to join them. Their message is clear: All aboard!

The main event

Flight attendants seat guests in one of three sections of the plane: Clipper Class, which was the original business class; First Class; and the Upper Deck Lounge, which historically was part of First.

Once everyone is comfortable, the “purser” gives a series of announcements, and flight attendants go through safety demonstrations. The script is a mix of throwback warnings and modern wit: “Unless we have an earthquake tonight, there won’t be much movement, so your seat belt isn’t really necessary.”

After a welcome video from Toth, flight attendants wheel out magazine carts, distribute magazines, take drink orders and bring hot towels in buckets of dry ice, creating an almost magical smoke.

Finally, the meal begins. A white-jacketed maître-d brings out menus. Flight attendants pull out retractable tables and set them with Pan Am-branded tablecloths, dishes and silverware. Upper Deck Lounge guests get a caviar course first. Then everyone chooses between appetizers of shrimp cocktail and caprese salad.

Following a fashion show of Pan Am uniforms from the late 1960s and early ’70s, a throwback dinner is served: Chateaubriand sliced tableside or roast chicken, both served with carrots, green beans and potatoes. (There’s a pasta option for vegetarians, too.) As guests eat, disco plays on the cabin speaker system.

Trivia and another fashion show of uniforms from the 1980s follow dinner, leading into a wine-and-cheese course, Cognac, coffee and chocolate mousse cake or fruit tart for dessert.

A third and final fashion show of airline uniforms from all over the world closes the night.

Cigarettes and other details

Throughout the experience, it’s clear that Toth and Captan have spared no expense to make the flight authentic.

That means the seatbelt buckles are original, complete with the Pan Am globe logo etched into the top. It also means each of the table floral arrangements has sprigs of baby’s breath, just like the arrangements of the 1970s.

Even the cigarettes — props that puff smoke when you blow them — are eerily lifelike.

“Back in the 1970s, everybody on board airplanes smoked,” says Toth. “There was no way we were going to recreate this experience without trying to recreate that.”

Drink offerings include 1970s-approved Harvey Wallbangers and Tab soda. Hot towels smell the way they used to: Flight attendants soak them in some of the same scents as Pan Am used historically. The seat fabrics reflect the fading sun and moon designs of the day.

Another mind-boggling detail from the original Pan Am planes: The “nose wall,” a needlepoint artwork at the front of the First-Class cabin that depicts a sailboat on the water on a sunny afternoon.

For guests who have a history with the airline — former flight attendants or family members of former Pan Am employees — these tiny touches are more than an appreciated detail; they’re a link to the past.

“As soon as I saw the First-Class cabin, I started crying,” says Michelle Fedder, who started her career as a flight attendant with Pan Am and recently met three former colleagues here. “It was like they took my memories out of my brain and brought them back to life.”

Brice Cooper, creative director at Pan American World Airways, the New Hampshire company that licenses Pan Am trademarks worldwide, agrees.

“What they’ve done here in recreating the vibe and feel of flying on Pan Am is nothing short of remarkable,” he says.

Evolution of a dream

The Pan Am Experience is really Toth’s brainchild.

The 52-year-old has been obsessed with planes since his childhood, and fell in love with Pan Am while flying to Europe one summer to visit his grandparents in Italy. He acquired his first pair of airplane seats when he was 16, and started making trips to the airplane graveyard in the Mojave Desert to buy airplane parts in his 20s.

Eventually, he had enough parts to build the ground floor of the 22-foot-long Pan Am set in his garage. He moved the set to a storage facility so he could break out his prized spiral staircase and create a second floor.

That first set forms the bones of the Pan Am Experience today.

Sometime around 2014, after the ill-fated television show, “Pan Am,” mutual friends connected Toth and Captan, who had heard about the set and wanted to see it up close. He was blown away.

Captan, a long-time movie producer who immigrated to the US from Lebanon when he was 17, had the idea to use the set to host an event, and a trial dinner sold out at an aviation memorabilia collectors’ show in a matter of minutes. Demand was so high, the duo ended up hosting more events. Later that year, Captan moved Toth’s set into Air Hollywood, his aviation-themed film studio here. The Pan Am Experience has been flying high ever since.

Vegas, here we come?

Nowadays, the Pan Am Experience takes off every Saturday at 6 p.m. sharp, and about half are open to the public. Tickets for the dinners are sold in pairs and range in price from $475 to $875, depending on seating class.

The next two public dinners scheduled for March 9 and March 23 are sold out, and there’s a waiting list for dinners later in the year.

Captan and Toth hope to open an outpost in Las Vegas.

Details of the expansion are still under development, but Captan says the new experience likely would include turbulence and white noise. More seats on the set and a separate bar and gift shop open to the public throughout the week also are likely.

“My hope is that people who never got a chance to fly Pan Am get an opportunity to see how fantastic air travel was back in the era, while those who might have been able to experience it bring back memories that remind them of the good old days,” says Toth. “This is a part of our history worth celebrating.”

Copyright 2019 by CNN NewSource. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

DUBAI IS OFTEN called a “Disneyland for the rich”. At the city’s airport the three first-class lounges of Emirates, the United Arab Emirates’ flag-carrier, do not disappoint. Each one is as big as the terminal’s concourse, built to accommodate thousands of passengers. But every day only a hundred or so enter each first-class lounge. Instead of the overpriced fast-food on offer in the public concourse, a maze of restaurants and bars serve free caviar and champagne. In their duty-free sections no knock-off cigarettes or booze are in sight. Think instead Bulgari necklaces and whisky at $25,000 a bottle. The facility is so large, its manager admits, that the most common reaction heard from new arrivals is, “Oh my God, where is the lounge?”

Yet the rows of hundreds of empty armchairs suggest that something is not quite right. Airlines are falling out of love with first class. And that is true even of Emirates, which sells far more first-class tickets than any other carrier (see chart 1). The time to launch new first-class offerings is at ITB Berlin, the world’s largest trade show for the travel industry, which opened on March 6th. At this event in 2017 Emirates unveiled a new onboard bar and lounge for its highest-paying passengers. The same year its big rival in the Gulf, Qatar Airways, launched the world’s first skyborne double-beds. But the mood has changed. Last year Emirates stopped attending the show at all.

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The decline of first-class air travel seems at first glance surprising. Facilities onboard have never been so good. On its A380 superjumbos, Emirates first class provides in-flight showers. Moreover, the number of very rich people has risen sharply. Forbes, a magazine, estimates that the stock of billionaires has doubled to more than 2,100 over the past two decades. And the rest of the luxury-travel business is booming. Richard Clarke of Bernstein, a research firm, estimates that the number of luxury hotels in Asia could increase by as much as 168% over the next decade.

Even so, many analysts predict that first class will soon disappear. In America it is already almost extinct. Ten or so years ago almost all the many hundreds of long-haul aircraft based there offered first-class seating; now only about 20 do. Elsewhere in the world an increasing number of airlines, including Turkish Airlines and Air New Zealand, have already scrapped it completely. On the majority of the most-travelled long-haul routes the number of first-class seats available has fallen sharply in the past decade (see chart 2). Even the airlines that sell the most first-class fares are curbing their enthusiasm. The number of first-class seats has been slashed from 14 to 11 on Emirates’ superjumbos and from 12 to six on those flown by Singapore Airlines.

When commercial aviation got going after the second world war there was only one class: first. Economy appeared in the 1950s. It was followed in the 1970s by business class and in the 1990s by premium economy, to fill the gap between business and cattle class.

Despite the proliferation of cheaper seats, airlines still make a lot of their money from the more expensive ones. Emirates claims that first- and business-class passengers are 12% of the total but generate about 40% of its turnover. High demand for flat beds on transatlantic flights is what has saved European flag-carriers such as British Airways (BA), Air France and Lufthansa from going out of business. Ross Harvey of Davy, a stockbroker, points out that transatlantic low-cost airlines that have tried to offer just economy or premium-economy seats, such as Norwegian and WOW, have struggled to make money.

Airline bosses are acutely worried about the decline in demand for first class. But they have themselves partly to blame. The industry has disrupted itself, points out Geoffrey Weston of Bain Company, a consultancy. On short-haul flights, the low-cost model has won. Most “first-class” passengers on these routes now sit in seats with the same legroom as economy passengers, albeit with an empty middle seat, and make do with extras such as lounge access, and food and drink.

On longer routes, new seats that turned into fully flat beds were a game-changer. These were originally introduced by BA in first class in 1995, and much sought after. If travellers can sleep comfortably in the sky, they can save the cost of a hotel or, more importantly for time-pressed corporate warriors, a day’s working time. However, in 2000BA launched a similar seat in business, and most carriers have followed suit. That has weakened the case for flying first class. Most companies think a flat bed in business class is good enough for their employees. Only a few honchos are allowed to enjoy first class on the company dime, says Greeley Koch of the Association of Corporate Travel Executives, a trade group.

Changing attitudes among the very rich are also sapping demand. Over the past decade the number of billionaires has grown fastest in China, India and the tech hubs of America. But many self-made tycoons want their children to have the “normal” middle-class upbringings they themselves had, says Charlotte Vangsgaard of ReD Associates, a consultancy. So they book themselves and their families into business, or sometimes economy, rather than first.

Airlines that offer first class say they still do so for two main reasons. The first is to use upgrades from business class as an incentive for loyalty from both corporate and individual customers. But as the gap between business and first has narrowed, frequent flyers have begun to respond better to other incentives, such as access to lounges or to special hotlines.

The second reason for maintaining first class is also weakening. That is what Samuel Engel of ICF, another consultancy, calls the “halo effect” an airline creates by advertising first-class facilities. In other words, flyers begin to think economy on Emirates, say, is fancier than on other airlines by association with features in its first class, such as in-flight showers. This can be an effective marketing tool. For instance, Etihad, a rival to Emirates in the Gulf, has probably had more press coverage for its onboard first-class apartments called “The Residence”, of which it has only ten, than all its 30,000 other seats combined.

Many airlines, however, are no longer convinced by this argument and have slimmed down their first-class offerings. One such is Air France-KLM, whose chief executive in 2014, Alexandre de Juniac, claimed that first class was “little more than a costly marketing gimmick” and that “no one makes money out of it”.

Yet some still do, particularly Emirates. One advantage it has is that it can combine traffic from various destinations using its hub in Dubai. This helps it make first class viable on routes where it might otherwise struggle to attract first-class passengers. As a result, over 90% of its first-class bookings are paid for, rather than free upgrades.

Why do some passengers still want to fly first rather than business? Privacy is one reason, says Sir Tim Clark, the airline’s president. Smaller cabins and walled-off seats make it easier for a celebrity to fly unnoticed by fellow passengers who might otherwise tweet unflattering pictures of them drooling in their sleep. Another is flexibility. First-class passengers want to sleep and eat when they choose, not on a timetable set by cabin crew, as often happens in business class, says Joost Heymeijer, head of Emirates Inflight Catering.

But even Emirates’ first- and business-class sales are threatened by private jets. These let executives avoid the wait for a scheduled flight. It is also much quicker to pass through security in a private-jet terminal than an airport. And in America ten times as many airports are open to private jets as are available for the bigger aircraft airlines use. Moreover, executive jets are becoming cheaper in relative terms, says Adam Twidell of PrivateFly, a private-jet booking service. New shared-ownership and ride-hailing services allow the cost of a private jet to be spread over many users.

The rise of the private jet may be good news for bigwigs rushing to meetings. But it is bad news for the environment. The World Bank estimates that first- and business-class passengers on a narrow-body jet already generate between 2.5 and six times more carbon emissions per person than the poor saps crammed into the cheap seats. Private jets, obviously, are worse. A half-filled private jet is roughly five times dirtier than business class and 12 times dirtier than economy on short-haul routes.

A new breed of supersonic executive jets will be even more polluting. The International Council on Clean Transportation, a think-tank, estimates that their emissions will be five to seven times greater than for standard jets. Boom, one of the startups hoping to produce these jets, has forecast that up to 2,000 such supersonic aircraft will be built by 2035.

Another trend that could hasten the end of the arms race in first-class facilities is the shift towards smaller passenger jets. On February 14th Airbus, maker of the A380 superjumbo, announced that it will stop production of new ones from 2021. This aircraft’s bulbous fuselage left space that could be devoted to fancy first-class features such as Emirates’ showers and Etihad’s apartment suites. The smaller and more efficient jets that have consigned the A380 to an early grave lack this extra space. It would be hard to fit showers, for instance, in the new long-haul narrow-body jets now available.

So Emirates will need another way to get its passengers to pay extra—perhaps by further upgrading those cavernous lounges. Its lounge manager in Dubai sounds perplexed: “You need to do something different to make first class worth it.”