The future of air travel?

I was lucky (or perhaps unlucky) enough to be part of the testing phase for a personal in-flight entertainment system while traveling. The results – less than satisfying. Unresponsive controls and multiple system failures combined with high latency to create a terrible overall system. And yes – Air Canada, the airline which implemented the system, will be charging in the near future.

My initial thoughts on the system were initially optimistic. The first two hours of the flight were without problem. I should have known something would soon be amiss as soon as the airline attendant came over the announcement system warning people not to select the Map, Showreel, or Game options. As I said, however, the first two hours of the flight were fine. When I was an hour and thirty minutes into the movie The Borne Ultimatum, however, the announcement system again came on with a warning. Do not touch the screens, the crew would reboot the system because some passengers had not listened to the earlier warning and were stuck at the soon-to-be-famous Air Canada Black Screen of Death. (Well, actually, it was just a Linux boot screen.)

Twenty minutes later we were still all sitting at black boot screens. The system had already fully initialized once, but for some unknown reason the crew had felt it necessary to reboot again. The cabin crew were beginning to feel less like administrators and more like end users, they hadn’t a clue on how to use the system. Another five minutes or so and we were told that the system would not be available for the remainder of the flight. The system was up but not working. Clicking on my language of choice (English) I saw why. Nothing was fully developed. Errors filled the screen. And I got my first glimpse at the bleak future in one of these errors – “The choice is yours for $null CDN,” this bad experience will soon be for sale. (I can hope, at least, that it will remain so reasonably priced, $null is fairly reasonable for airlines!)

Another fifteen minutes or so and the system started working for no reason and with no announcement. Fearing the “Please choose a credit card to pay with” screen would return if I didn’t act quickly, I selected my movie. Following the general trend of the system, it worked fine for ten minutes or so, but the reality of the situation became apparent soon thereafter. The movie started to freeze up. With each passing moment the frames per second lessened. The audio began to distort. It brought back unpleasant memories of Windows ME.

In all fairness I was able to finish watching my movie. Unless airlines begin to get serious about these systems, however, the future of air travel looks anything but good.