Key in the cognition - November 24th, 2007

10:13 pm - Airline 2.0: my first experience flying on Virgin America

Virgin Airlines has a reputation for being innovative and customer-focused so, when they began operating in the US (as Virgin America) with direct flights between SFO and JFK, I decided to give them a whirl. They have an online flight booking system that's quite good and, like every other airline I've used, let me check in online. The flight I took yesterday afternoon was only half full, presumably because of Thanksgiving, so boarding was the fastest I've ever experienced.

The seats on the aeroplane were all new and shiny. They were also surprisingly comfortable for an economy cabin. And I was pleasantly surprised to be offered a choice between two different styles of complementary headsets (the traditional kind with a band that goes around the head as well as ear-buds, which I prefer). As it turned out, their ear-buds were awful and made a loud buzzing sound. Fortunately the audio port on the seat is a standard one so I was able to plug my Apple ear-buds in and enjoy their far superior sound instead. Virgin's safety instructions are the best I've ever seen. They have created a very captivating animated guide to the aeroplane's safety features and procedures that I enjoyed watching despite normally tuning that information out entirely.

But the key difference between Virgin and the other US airlines is their in-flight entertainment system called Red. It's apparently based on Linux, although the only passenger-visible evidence of this is that one of the games available on it has the word Linux in its title. I played around with the system extensively during my 5 hour flight and was impressed by its design, although they seem to have adopted the open-source mantra of "release early, release often" and it's still in beta so several of the features have not yet ben implemented. That said, the parts that were available for use did work quite well.

Virgin's approach to music, as you might expect from a company with experience in the music industry, is well thought-out. In addition to a diverse selection of channels playing preselected music, passengers can create their own playlist by browsing through an extensive list of songs organized by genre and artist. Removing the currently-playing song from the playlist did not cause it to immediately skip to the next song as I was expecting but instead it simply continued playing the song! A few times it also skipped to the next song before completely finishing the current one. Those were, however, the only bugs I encountered in the entire system during my flight.

On the video side, Red offers a few music videos and several live TV feeds sporting popular shows. While all of those are free, the selection of several new movies costs $8 a pop, which seems a tad steep. For those who chose to cough up, payment is very convenient via the swipe of a major credit card. In fact, you can also use a credit card to pay for food by ordering it through Red. The interface for doing this is simple and intuitive, although my experiences with it suggest that the staff are still getting used to it. I tried ordering a free drink of tomato juice but only ended up having it delivered when the stewardess came by in person to ask if we wanted anything to drink. Later I requested a bottle of water using the system and it got marked as having been delivered without me actually ending up with one. Slightly irked, I placed another order about half an hour later and this time was immediately rewarded with the delivery of three bottles! Personally, I'd prefer low latency over high throughput when ordering beverages.

Disappointingly, the email, e-zine and inter-passenger chat features were not available, although the stewardess did not seem to be aware of this as she encouraged us to use the chat. The flight status system is excellent, however. It is powered by Google Maps and allows passengers to interactively pan and zoom while the plane's current position and direction is displayed via a little icon. Being able to see the flight path would have been a nice touch but that wasn't an option.

Overall, I give Virgin America an A for design, an A for effort, a B for quality but a C for functionality. I hope to try them out again with better results in the future when Red is out of beta.

Current Mood: impressed