How to Make Drinking at Home Feel Like Flying First Class

This is the we use bar we use in the Telstar Logistics Executive Lounge. Actually, it's an old airline galley cart, and this is the story of how it ended up in our headquarters... and how you can get one too.

A few years ago, we decided we wanted a galley cart -- the kind that flight attendants push down the aisles while serving food and drinks in the skies. Why? Well, we're hopeless aviation geeks, of course, but we also admired the simplicity, durability, and functionality of airline galley carts. Plus, we reasoned, a galley cart would be the perfect foundation for a compact bar setup.

Our quest to find a cart eventually took us to the deserts of El Mirage, California, where we found an aircraft boneyard with a few old galley carts to spare. Here's the one we liked best, as it looked the moment when we first laid eyes upon it:

It's an old SAS galley cart from the late-1970s, manufactured in Switzerland by a company called Bucher. We bought it, took it to a self-service car wash to clean off the dust, then carried it home. Later, we built a few matching drawers from acrylic sheet plastic, then loaded our cart up with vintage airline glassware, tiny bottles of liquor, cans of mixers, and plenty of napkins and bags of peanuts pinched from the cabins of the world's leading airlines.

It's turned out to be a wonderful tool for living. When not in use, all our barware and booze stows compactly and unobtrusively inside the cart. Come fun-time, the cart quickly converts into a bar, with plenty of workspace, easy access to bottles, and a snap-on tray (also found at the boneyard) that provides another level of storage for condiments and cocktail accessories:

And you can imagine how giddy we became when we flew on SAS in 2007, and discovered that the airline still uses carts exactly like ours in regular commercial service:

So where can you get one too?

Used airline galley carts are hard to find, and short-wheelbase carts like ours — which are much better-suited to domestic use — are even more rare. And even if you make the trek to the desert to visit a boneyard, the carts you'll find there are often in sad shape. New ones, however, cost several thousand dollars.

Happily, we just discovered another option. The Swiss company that manufactured our cart has an American subsidiary called Bucher Aerospace, and Bucher is now selling new carts to the general public at a very fair price.



Prices start at around $800 for an empty cart sold in a selection of 10 tasteful colors. Throw in options like top rails, a foot brake (handy during social turbulence), and some interior fittings, and the final price comes closer to $1300.



That's much less than a premium class roundtrip ticket from California to New York, and trust us when we say this: Having one of these carts at home makes every day feel like flying First Class.

LINK:
AlCarts (Airline-style Galley Carts from Bucher Aerospace)

Comments

[Todd Huffman]

Sweet, an excellent idea -- functional and stylish. There are some aircraft bone yards near me in AZ... I'll try there, but if not then definitely one of the Bucher ones...

[Casey McG]

So great!
Must. Have. One. Now.
I might just use this as a good excuse for trip to a boneyard. 8 bills is not an unreasonable price, but just hard to justify given these precarious times.
Thanks for the brilliant post.

[champagne]

I enjoyed the article. I found it to be very interesting well written and informative. Keep up the great work. You have helped me to learn more about it. Thanks