Anthony Tooff spends 25 years and $100,000 building a 1970s Pan Am 747 cabin replica in a warehouse

Anthony Tooff has spent nearly 25 years building a replica of a 1970s Pan Am 747 cabin. He says he doesn't know anyone who has gone to the same lengths to recreate the look, feel and structure of the aircraft.

Tooff says he works for a major airline and has loved aviation since he was a boy. He started building airplane models at about 10. His first was a diorama of a Pan Am 747, made after a trip, with wood pieces cut by his uncle and covered in Pan Am colors.

The hobby grew from there. At about 16 he got his first set of airline seats, which became his first aircraft mockup. By his mid-30s he had a small cabin in his living room that stretched into the dining room. In his 40s he rebuilt his garage to look like a vintage airplane. Then, he says, he ran out of garage space.

The 747 cabin is the result. Tooff says he is not an aircraft engineer and has never worked for Boeing. He did a lot of research and went to the Mojave Desert, since few intact 747s are left. He wanted the early 1970s version with the spiral staircase, and he found three or four intact ones.

He took one apart piece by piece and trucked the parts over about a month. Sorting thousands of pieces took roughly a year, he says. Buying the aircraft, trucking it and building the replica cost him $100,000, which he calls totally worth it.

Tooff says he flew Pan Am at age 5, and that experience is what he wanted to recreate. The first class cabin uses vintage Pan Am seats from the period, which he found about 15 years ago in a warehouse in Hollister, California. He says Pan Am called the first class seat the Slumberette. It was operated manually with hydraulic buttons and a pull-up footrest.

He also recreated the forward closet wall, where a flight attendant would take a passenger's coat. He had a custom carpet maker in Los Angeles match the carpet exactly. Tooff says the carpeted wall reflects Clipper ships at sunset, tied to Pan Am's Clipper branding.

Tooff wired all 18 first class seats so a real Pan Am headset can be plugged into any of them to play video and audio. As a child he recorded Pan Am's onboard music and announcements on a tape recorder, so he could relive the flight at home.

Up the spiral staircase is the first class lounge, which he describes as the 747 dining room. Tooff says passengers were invited up after takeoff to eat at tables set with white linen and real china. He says none of that furniture still exists in any airplane he could find, so he had to recreate the seats, tables and a glass sidewall partition.

Behind a curtain is a Clipper Class cabin, which he describes as an early form of business class. It was essentially coach seats with a bit more legroom, a slightly better meal and free alcohol, he says. Beyond that is where he ran out of money. He hopes one day to build out the full coach cabin.

The outside of the plane is just a skin of sidewall panels. Support beams that run 20 feet across the cabin hold the upper deck platform and the panels in place. Tooff also built a vintage ticket counter lobby, with destination boards, luggage tags and computers from the 1970s. He says it all came from the Pan Am ticket counter at LAX, and that he was in the right place when Pan Am ceased operations in about December 1991.

Tooff says none of the parts in the replica actually work, and he reminds friends not to use them. It started as a hobby and a place to hang out with friends. For the last few years he has rented it out to Hollywood productions. His parents once told him to stop spending on memorabilia and save for a house and retirement. Now that it brings in a little money, he says, opinions of his collection have changed.