Yes, it's a real skull. at one time, our next door neighbor was a retired surgeon. He gave my father a whole skeleton. It was somebody, disassembled in a cardboard box. Of all the bones in the box, the skull was the only one that seemed to have been used in medicine as it had the names of all the parts of the skull written in ink on it. The box is long gone, but the skull still is around somewhere.

The airline seats are from a model that my dad did after he retired, in which he created the entire interior of a wide body jet in the garage and filled it with these ceramic casts of passenger seats.

I was asked if this was a statement about airline safety. It isn't. My dad liked the skull, and he had it on the window sill above his desk. If he had a friend over, he might put it on the bar or up in the glassware above the bar. There, it was no more of a statement about the evils of alcohol than it was a reflection of death in commercial air travel when on the sill. To him, the skull was a conversation piece.