Interlude

Ok let's face it ... I don't have the most astronomical readership. But I know a few of you out there, and thank you for reading.

The past months have been tough for me, for personal reasons, and I am only now coming back to normalcy. Please look forward to a return of Santosh the Global Traveler.

Entertainment

Inflight entertainment is mostly pretty bad. That is, unless the airline has either invested in retrofitting their jets or outright bought new jets.

If you are the unfortunate many that prefer to travel with "legacy" carriers like Lufthansa or United, you will no doubt know that most of their jets have a central projector and the choices of entertainment are non existent.

However if you happen to travel with a broader set of carriers, then you must have seen the newer systems.

The best system I've experienced is on Singapore Airlines, but that was in First Class so let's exclude them.

Within the US, the best coach class entertainment system is with Delta. Virgin America, a new entrant, may have a better system. I'll fly them later this month and report back.

JetBlue is second best. Both Delta and JetBlue have live TV as well as movies, games and music. However, Delta's selection is better.

Alaska has done a smart job of introducing Digeplayers - digital entertainment systems that you can rent and place it on your seat back table to watch. It has a variety of movies, TV shows, games and more. However since it isn't attached to the seat, you have to close it down if you wish to use the seat back table for anything else. American Airlines is following suit, though only on their transcontinental flights.

The only system better than Delta's is Continental's on their 777-200. Only some of their jets have them. The system is very similar to what's found on Delta, only with far more options. More movies, more music and more games. It also appears to have been prepped for INTERNET access.

This all makes a lot of sense. The systems used by JetBlue, Continental and Delta run on a version of Linux, a computer operating system. Without digressing, I'll say that Linux is a powerful, yet cheap alternative to more traditional systems and thus allows an airline to experiment more freely with their options.

The ideal entertainment system, next ...

787 and 747-8

Boeing had a problem some years ago when Airbus proposed their ungainly, ugly behemoth called the A380. Airbus's bet was that increased demand required a big jet to fly people around the world.

Boeing already had a big jet - the 747. In addition to being big, the 747 is a very beautiful jet. The design evokes images of power and strength. It's just a really big beautiful jet.

However Boeing bet that increased capacity was due to decreasing ticket prices. Combined with increasing fuel cost, the world needed a jet that would be cheap to fly, but could fly far and carry a lot. Hence the 787.

The 787 was not a competitive product to the A380, rather, Boeing's take on the same data that Airbus used when they decided to build the A380. In order to compete on par, Boeing announced the 747-8 Transcontinental, a jet that was essentially a 787 in fabric but a 747 in design.

Unfortunately, despite serious marketing, both projects are in a little trouble. The 787-3, which is the launch product, has issues with marrying the avionics and other instruments. While this is a setback in time, it also induces uncertainty in the minds of customers. This directly threatens the 747-8 as that jet isn't scheduled to launch until 2010.

For the sake of beautiful design, we can only hope that Boeing's woes won't be the undoing of stylish flight design. Capitalism has never been stylish, yet we've managed to make it stylish. In the rush for profits, we can only hope the world keeps it that way.

Upgrades update

The days of free upgrades may be coming to an end. It makes sense once you hear the reasons.

Having just received this information, it's fresh off the press. United is upgrading their business and first class product. Other airlines are doing the same. Even more others are buying new jets with beautiful new products.

In all this investment, there's no room for freebies. Typically, after about 5 years in service, the full fare passenger finds that the product has aged too much to pay full fare, at which time the airline tries to pull additional revenue by upgrading passengers.

For now, with the stiff competition in the airline marketplace, their best source of revenue is their business product. Even if the airline doesn't entirely do away with their upgrade policy, it would become increasingly difficult to upgrade if the plan works as the seats would have been sold out to full fare passengers.

To upgrade or not to upgrade? That is the question ...

Upgrades are the wild card in the airline industry. Be nice when checking in, and you just might get upgraded.

In the airline industry, the available business or first class seat is often used to upgrade an economy class passenger. This is typically done because the freed up economy class seat can be re-sold to someone who is willing to pay a higher fare for that seat.

The person receiving the upgrade is chosen from amongst many factors, namely, frequent flyer status, the ticket class and how sold out that flight is.

In my experience, I've been upgraded because I am a frequent flyer. I've also used stickers for upgrades.

Now this needs an explanation. Different airlines have different methods that they utilize to define their upgrades. American Airlines uses stickers. After you fly a certain number of miles, you are awarded 4 upgrade stickers. Each sticker is worth 500 miles and so a trip of 1600 miles would need 4 stickers. You can also buy stickers and use them for an upgrade, if seats are available. Even there, it depends on the ticket class.

On other airlines such as NorthWest and Continental, so long as seats are available and you are a frequent flyer with status, you get upgraded for free.

Automatic and complimentary upgrades on international flights don't happen. This is mostly because international travel is generally more expensive, less competitive than the domestic market and not really open to scrutiny by the general public.

There is, however, the option of spending miles on upgrades. This, however, required you to hold a Y or H class ticket, meaning that it's a full fare refundable ticket. In this case, capacity allowing, you can spend some of your hard flown frequent flyer miles to move up a class, and the reward is worth it.

Let's think about this - a complimentary upgrade on a 4 hour flight feels good. Business class in a bed you can actually sleep on over a 15 hour flight - good sense. The only thing is the cost. That, unfortunately, boils down to your wallet.

Hence the dilemma ... To upgrade or not.

Why live TV on airplanes is bad ...

Ok TV sucks. That's not because of the technology or anything, it's just that there's rarely anything good on. So much so that with the abundance of channels that show nothing but nothing, people actually feel safe watching TV programs, for that connection to their reality.

Now that airlines like JetBlue and Delta have premiered DirecTV and Dish Network respectively, it brings about an interesting mix of experiences.

The novelty factor is astronomically high. Watching even 36 of those hundreds of channels while flying across the country is amazing.

You have the Food Network, NBC, Discovery and more.

Fly as often as I do and you'd probably do what you'd do at home - channel surf for a while. With at most 36 channels, you'd likely soon tire and turn off the TV.

However even if you were to keep flipping channels, you'd become aware of an interesting problem with live broadcast TV - it was designed to be viewed by a stationary TV.

When you fly across the country, or for that matter, the world, the jet passes over vast tracts of land where the only residents are bison or mustangs, or rattlesnakes. The cable companies don't cover these regions, and if there is coverage, it's because of the spill over from a nearby satellite.

During these times, you have the dubious pleasure of flipping through frozen channels at best, and a "signal not found" message at worst.

It would make so much more sense for airlines to provide pre-recorded programming. From the perspective of the passenger, the majority of the programs are not time sensitive so even if it were to have been recorded earlier, the entertainment value would have been preserved.

So is live TV in jets about entertainment, or an addiction to real time information, like blackberries and cell phones?

Water water everywhere, and not a drop to drink?

In parts of the southwest of the US, there are towns where running water can be expected for only three hours per day. This isn't because they are backward, but because there is a drought.

In other parts of the southwest of the US, and the rest of the world, thousands of gallons of water are put into landfills as a result of discarded liquids from airport security lines.

It has been many years since the "no liquids" rule, and little has been done to address the practicality of it. In principle it works, however, people bring huge amounts of liquids with them to the airport and then discard perfectly good, unused liquids in the trash in order to pass security.

Why can't those liquids be recovered and put to good use? Surely, those liquids can be used for irrigation, or perhaps it could be filtered and cleaned and then re bottled and sold. Dasani and Aquafina do this - and their product isn't stellar.

Any way you look at it, water is too precious a resource to waste for any reason and the longer it takes to realize this, the more abject the shortages will be.

The US is in trouble with their water resources. The water disposed off at airports in the form of mineral water, juices, sports drinks and other types of sodas won't be enough to reverse the drought. It would, however, be enough to help some poor families to have drinking water for one more day.