The service on US Flights have never been poorer and yet the Airlines make still millions and billions of profit. I wrote about the Virgin America Tickets Auction earlier and I think they deserve more attention here are 10 Reasons to fly Virgin America by Xeni Jardin:
(1) Most comfortable coach I’ve experienced on any domestic carrier. Comfy, well-designed seats, nice leg room, seats sit at a pitch that maximizes stretch space.
(2) Obscenely comfy white leather seats (with "massage" feature) in first class. Pretty reasonable first class fares (I suppose they’ll be higher later, but they’re comparatively quite low right now).
(3) They’re using open source software in every place possible. Linux galore.
(4) In-flight, seat-to-seat chat (now you can bitch about babies crying or barf-inducing turbulence — with emoticons!). Or you can group chat around each TV channel (while you watch TV), or join topic-based chat rooms.
(5) Google Freakin’ Maps.
(6) In-flight entertainment and info system has a super user-friendly GUI, and it’s touchscreen! With little qwerty keyboards!
(7) Games. Including Doom. They’re planning an open source game design competition, will feature winning games on the flights.
(8) In-flight text messaging and email are apparently on the way, as are pay-per-download music sales (mostly Virgin artists at launch, I’d guess).
(9) Movies are fairly recent ones you’d actually want to watch (including large selection of international fare for non-English-speaking passengers). Cool TV selections. You can get channels like IFC and Current in-flight. Music videos. Scan TV listings in a programming guide, see what’s on when. You can set reminders for yourself for TV shows you want to catch.
(10) Cool internet content on the way. They’re doing deals with internet video content producers, and will have in-flight broadband in place next year (pending FAA approval) for even more frequent video content uploads. Incidentally, they have a cool related system for frequent system software updates. Many cool things about the IT design behind VA.
Read the full story here.
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