BA plane diverts

[Garry Russell]

There was none on VC 10's

Garry

[speedbird591]

There was none on VC 10's

There you go! Nothing classically British about In-Flight Entertainment!

Mind you we made a fortune out of headset rental on the 707s. Can't tell you how, though! ;-)

Ian

[forthbridge]

There was none on VC 10's

There you go! Nothing classically British about In-Flight Entertainment!

Mind you we made a fortune out of headset rental on the 707s. Can't tell you how, though! ;-)

Ian

:think: Tsk! Tsk!

[Prop Jockey]

Amazing. During 1964-79 I spent many hours flying as a passenger the length and breadth of the UK without any entertainment system to hand other than a British Cal breakfast or a BA afternoon tea, G&T etc was available.

With many people now seemingly isolated in the worlds of laptops and/or ipods why can't airlines cast out this once useful markreting tool called IFE? Just let all the pax continue to use laptops and ipods - at least they would be seeing whatever they wished and the airline would not be required to pay for endless inflight tapes and the maintenace of that IFE equipment.

And not just maintenance hobby, BA are currently upgrading their equipment to provide a greater selection of services 'on demand', with the ability to pause, rewind etc too. Speaking personally I'm happy with the laptop and the iPod, although back in Economy there is no in-seat power so you're at the mercy of your batteries (as a side note, I hear US security is now frowning on anything more than 2 batteries for a laptop). However, with BA's new Business Class, you can use a regular travel adapter with your laptop rather than having to shell out for one of these specific 'airplane' adapters that set you back about £80.

Anyway - all a non-event for me, and I spoke to one of the crew of the Houston flight that diverted to Chicago and that was a non-event too. Still, the stock market wasn't open so they had to find something to print

[Chris Trott]

Just be glad it wasn't a failure in the Airbus IFE. On the Boeings, the IFE is MEL'able (i.e. can be inoperable). On the Airbus, the IFE is "integrated" into the airplane's systems and you cannot depart with it inop. The interesting thing with BA's system though is it seems to have a higher inflight failure rate than anyone else. The UAL guys at Denver who worked the BA flight always talked about how they couldn't understand why their system kept having problems as the UAL birds were pretty hassle free (other than the occasional reboot due to an FA's flubbed input that froze the system).

Then again, you also can't buy an Airbus without their "integrated" IFE system, whereas you can still buy (and in fact several do) Boeings without an IFE system as it's not "integrated" into anything on the airplane, just removable interior items like the overhead bins and seats.