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April 1, 2003
Qantas -- the Gadgety Airline
Well, I just returned from 2 weeks in Australia. What a great country/continent! Thoroughly enjoyed just about every aspect of the trip. The worst part was the 16-hour flight between Melbourne and LAX on the way home, and that was mostly tolerable. Qantas is a pretty great airline, from my limited exposure to it. It really tried to make the trip enjoyable, but being surrounded by bawling 3-year olds (not mine, other peoples') for 16 hours will make anyone question his sanity, let alone not get much sleep.
The coolest thing about the Qantas flight was that it was on a pretty new Boeing 747 (2002, I believe). We were flying coach and every seat had its own 8" LCD display in the seatback ahead. Now, I immediately thought, "how cool...the tall guy in the seat ahead of me won't block my view of the movies." Well, that wasn't the half of it. Each seat had its own controller that you could use to select from about 12 channels of continuously running programming (movies, tv shows, news, etc.) as well as 10 different video games (simple stuff like trivia, backgammon, Tetris, and a Loderunner-esque game). How much did each of these features cost, you ask? Nada. Zilch. Zippo. Was I ever a happy camper to find that out. Just hit "On" on the controller and it's there just waiting for you.
All this gadgety goodness got me to thinking what other kinds of tech-related services they could (or should) offer to help us wary passengers pass the time. Here's a short list:
1) Multi-player head-to-head gaming. An obvious next step would be to let multiple players on the plane compete with each other. At the least, it'd be nice to play virtual backgammon with your pal in the next seat. But, it would be quite the treat to have a Quake/Warcraft server on board to let the more violent-minded of us get some frags in on the long journey.
2) Instant messaging. For large groups, like tours, it would make talking to each other a lot easier than shouting over the heads of sleeping passengers (who, if awakened, can be a bit surly). Granted, entering text would be limited to T9 or something akin to a phone-pad, but that's certainly better than nothing.
3) Video-on-demand. As it was, the 12 channels of programming looped every 2.5 hours, so if you wanted to see a second movie, you had to wait for the 45 minutes or whatever after the first one ended to start the second one. The other disadvantage to not having it VoD is if you make a bad choice (e.g., choosing to watch Matthew Perry's Serving Sara) and decide to abandon the movie after 20 minutes, you're screwed until the 2.5-hour mark rolls around again.
4) Memory card readers in the controller. Stick a CF-slot in there and make adapters available for the asking from the flight attendant. That way, you can sit there and share all those kewl vacation photos you took with your friends and neighbors.
5) Internet access. Sure, I can dream. Heck, if I'm dreaming, make it broadband access as well.
6) Access to an MP3 library. Hook up with a major record label and provide access to the entirety of the company's offerings. Since you're listening through their headphones on their system, it'd be somewhat secure. I think this would be pretty trivial to do if they really wanted to. Just add some "Buy this album now" buttons and you've got a built-in revenue stream from a captive audience.
Anyway, those are just a few ideas. I'm glad to see that some airlines are embracing the future, at least in some ways. It's still a bit ironic that this good-sized color LCD screen in the seatback was on throughout the flight (runway to runway) but my little low-res, low-power monochrome PDA had to be "switched off until 20 minutes into the flight." Oh, well...
Comments
Sounds like a great trip Craig! I can't wait to fly Qantas. :)
Posted by: mashby at April 1, 2003 11:54 PM