On inflight entertainment...

I find the article on the history of inflight entertainment a highly entertaining read.

Our family has an annual ritual, flying back to spend the summer in Hong Kong. It's a big family reunion every year. While I don't look forward to the hot and extremely humid weather, I always look forward to the flights themselves.

I don't like domestic in US, which reminds me mostly of a flying greyhound. There's no food, hardly any drinks that's worthy of the effort, and obviously, no entertainment. When airlines look for cuts in expenditure, they spare nothing. I recall that once, long time ago, when flying was such an exclusive and privileged experience. That's not true anymore. The airline industry has been on slow decline for a long time now. Recall also that, once upon a time, inflight entertainment used to be first-class luxury. Now everyone has it. But of course, something has to give. So, the food, the drinks, everything.

We normally travel by Continental. They probably have the best schedules, flying to Asia, out of New York. The departing flights are never too early, and the arriving flights to Hong Kong are never too late at night. Since they started flying over North Pole some two years ago, the flying time has cut by couple of hours too, which is even better. With young kids in tow, it's best to get on/off the planes as fast as you can.

But my husband never really like Continental much. His main complaints are, smaller seats and inflight entertainment. Maybe I'm not that big physically, so the smaller seats never bother me too much. For the rigidly scheduled movies of Continental's inflight entertainment, I must agree with him that it's not that ideal.

So, last year, when we flew with Cathy Pacific (CX), he immediately falls in love with it. The seats are arranged a bit differently, with seat pockets for magazines under your own seats, rather than in front of you. That's a good decision, since alot of seat pocket contents can get quite messy and unsightly with lots of trash after a long flight. They even have little hooks you can pull out to hang your clothes and some such. More importantly, the defining quality of CX is its inflight entertainment. Each seat can choose its own movies and programs, and can stop/start at any time. No longer would I have to stay up to watch for a movie on scheduled hours. The movies are quite current with what's showing in theater too, so I can watch a few movies, and delete them from my netflix queue when I arrive.

Interestingly, when we're flying this year, we find that Continental has upgraded its inflight entertainment system to be on par with CX. I guess, long-haul flights still pull in enough real money for airlines to put up a fight.

I wonder how long it might take, for long-haul flights to suffer the same cut-backs as domestic flights have suffered now in US. I hope that day won't come...