Somewhat related to my previous post on Malaysia Airlines, I recently came across this picture of the ‘story of satay’ in the Business Suite menu on its A350 aircraft. Here, there are fi- and fl-ligatures used (the word finest in the upper right, first in the lower right and flights on the lower left in the last line).

To the best of my knowledge, Gotham, the corporate font of Malaysia Airlines, does not have any fi- or fl-ligatures, and nor do the likes of Proxima Nova, Montserrat and Metropolis. Could I be mistaken? Were the ligatures mistakenly inserted from another font? Or are they hidden somewhere in the font file?

Source: Malaysia Airlines A350 Business Suite review | One Mile at a Time

Further to the point. Having examined the Gotham TTF/OTF files with FontForge, I have found no hidden fi-ligatures of any kind, and the ‘f’ and ‘i’ are always rendered as two separate letters, so maybe this could be a custom version.

However, it’s not like Malaysia Airlines regularly uses Gotham with ligatures. This is the only instance, and a strange exceptional case.

 

It could in theory be a custom version of Gotham for Malaysia Airlines, with ligated f_i and f_l ligatures. But given that the other samples from your source show separated f_i and f_l ligatures, I think the substitution hypothesis is the most probable. 

Curiously my Gotham was substituted by a Myriad ligature when I open a clients pdf up in Illustrator to do some work. This was only on my computer in the studio, other computers opened it without substitution.

Screen Shot 2021-01-13 at 2.44.45 pm.pdf