It’s no secret that yours truly likes to fly a lot, and that I think it would be great if planes were at least twice as fast, but sadly Concorde is long gone thanks to high costs and environmentalists. Oh well, at least Piers Morgan got assaulted by Jeremy Clarkson on the last flight, that almost makes up for it.
Today I had a chance to fly to San Francisco from Frankfurt in a European masterpiece, the mighty Airbus A380. It’s certainly not the fastest thing in the sky, but still the biggest passenger plane to enter service. We are all about chips, graphics and games, so of course I paid a lot of attention to in seat entertainment and boy this was a big surprise. A bad one.
Let’s be fair, the A380 got me to San Francisco in one piece but during this 10 and a half hour flight, the passengers experienced two in seat entertainment reboots. The video was working fine, but once Vin Diesel showed his face in this kerosene centric world, the video started to stutter. The flight attendant rebooted the seats once, the quick way and didn’t solve anything, and the second reboot, that took much longer than the first one, fixed the problem.
It's a shame that such a thing can happen to a plane that is just coming into service with major airlines. This particular one was probably even less than a year old. The big disappointment was the lack of an HD screen or even near-HD picture quality.
The user interface and touch screen were as responsive, by 2005 standards that is, and even Android 1.5 and iOS 1.0 work much better than what I've seen today in this big plane. Boeings feature a much more responsive system and it seems the US is still ahead of the old world in terms of in flight entertainment.
Oh yes, let’s not forget that this high tech plane doesn’t have internet either. Airbus plans to add internet support for select carriers at a later date. The outfit was apparently keen to push the A380 into service as soon as possible, after several costly and embarrassing delays, so it skimped out on some high tech features. (At least they didn’t cut corners on safety. Yet. sub.ed.)