It isn't every day that an airline switches alliances—the coalitions of different companies that broaden flight services—so when Continental made its long-planned switch to the Star Alliance, it did do so in dramatic fashion. With C.E.O.s from each of the 24 other Star Alliance airlines in town last Tuesday morning, Continental launched its new partnership by unveiling a new 757 with a Kabuki drop in its Newark Airport hanger and a party for 1,200 later that day at the Rose Center for Earth and Space.
"It's very exciting for us to join the Star Alliance," said Continental manager of promotions and sponsorships Felicia Daniels. "It gives us more access to other destinations."
The presence of executives from Star Alliance partners including Air Canada, Lufthansa, United Airlines—not to mention members of the press and live telecasts of the proceedings via Bloomberg and CNN—put the pressure on Continental to make a performance out of the launch, so they hired long-time partner David Beahm Design to produce the event.
"They needed a wow moment," Beahm said. "We thought about literally covering the plane like a work of art and then pulling the cloth, but it could have gotten snagged on anything, and one of those antennas is $400,000, so clearly we couldn't do that. We finally decided on a Kabuki drop, but at 60 by 200 feet, we think it might have been the world's largest—and no one could tell what would happen when it fell."
There's no official record of the world's biggest Kabuki drop, but all of the theater professionals Beahm consulted in the planning process had never heard of one so large and worried about where it would fall in the gusty hangar. "There was no way to know, so we just did it," Beahm said. "We rehearsed a couple of times, and it did exactly what it was supposed to—until the last rehearsal when one of the mechanisms didn't fire."
To make sure that the entire curtain wasn't left hanging at a single point, the malfunction was replaced with duct tape that easily ripped away when the rest of the curtain fell. The unveiling went off without error, and none of the more than 400 in attendance were left covered by the sheer drape.
Later in the day, Continental and Star Alliance hosted more than 1,200 guests—including each of the C.E.O.s present that morning—at the American Museum of Natural History's Rose Center for Earth and Space, chosen for its stellar decor. Guests dined on a meal catered by Restaurant Associates and listened to a set by the Source and a selection of flight-themed tunes performed by Broadway Cares.
"This was one of the biggest events we've had and, a week later, I'm still getting so many kind comments from guests," Daniels said. "The only thing I can think of that was comparable was from two years ago, when we had our party to celebrate 10 years of global expansion at the [New York Public] Library, but this was double the size."
