Watching the episode it occurred to us that every pilot has a flight jacket… what would a Starfleet uniform flight jacket look like? So we designed one just to answer that question. Based on USAF and NASA uniform guidelines for their flight jackets, we designed our jacket to complement Robert Blackman’s original Starfleet uniform designs for STAR TREK: ENTERPRISE.
Our jacket is the same color of dark blue used in the first two seasons of ENTERPRISE, and we ensured that the inside liner of the jacket would be the same “rescue” yellow gold color as the flight suits worn in the episode “First Flight”.
We also tried to make the jacket feel as “real” as we could. We felt that if we made it, the jacket should tell a story about Jonathan Archer. With that in mind, we remembered that a pilot’s flight jacket is a living breathing thing that changes with their career. Assignments change, missions change, and a flight jacket should be a reflection of that, and so moved the Starfleet Command patch from the left arm (where it was in “First Flight”) to the right and we added an ENTERPRISE assignment patch. Jonathan Archer would have kept his jacket current and after assuming command of the ENTERPRISE NX-01 he would have added his ship’s mission patch. All of these details and more were designed to help make this jacket feel like something that could have come directly from the set of ENTERPRISE.