No Wrench

Twelve hour flight from LA to New Zealand and it was surprisingly not that bad. I have to say, the addition of Video-On-Demand service to economy class international travel makes the entire thing an incredibly bearable experience. I would be woefully behind on my 2007 movies if it wasn’t for my long-haul international jaunts. The food, however, was pretty damn poor. I went with the Asian Vegetarian option, since my experience with American and British carriers is that is the most reliable meatless option. Obviously a mistake on a Kiwi airline. Dinner was some sort of tasteless vegetable curry. I think it was supposed to be Indian, but it was impossible to be sure, and it came with a pineapple and cucumber salad on the side. The Pinot Noir was excellent and definitely helped with the whole sleeping on the plane thing. I think I managed somewhere around eight hours of sleep, though it was off-and-on. Definitely better than my sister managed as the wails of the child behind us kept her up.

I don’t know what was wrong with the kid’s mother, but she just ignored him for the ten or so hours he spent alternatively crying and giggling gleefully while kicking the seats. I would have said something, because it was just incredibly rude to everyone around them in the plane, but I hate criticizing other people’s children. Nothing makes people more defensive and violent than implying they’ve screwed up raising their children. Which she obviously had, because the kid’s behavior was terrible, though I refrained from comment because I managed to sleep through the worst of it. But I digress.

Breakfast rolls around and Air New Zealand is right back with the winning food options. My sister had ordered the seafood meal option and she basically got a slab of grilled fish for breakfast. I received an almost enjoyable vegetable lo mein. Neither of these would be considered a typical breakfast food and usually when you request special meals they serve you a breakfast type meal that coincides with your special request. Not so much here. But besides the food and the manic depressive child behind us, it was a good flight. Even arrived early.

I’ve been looking forward to flying Virgin America since they launched; almost flew them last fall, but my business plans got shuffled around and my girlfriend ended up using the ticket instead. She was a fan, so I expected to be impressed. But on my recent flight from NYC to LAX I was anything but. I setup the flight so that I’d be in the air during the Rutgers/UConn basketball game, which should have been watchable on ESPN2 thanks to the Dish TV that Virgin America offers. However, for some unknown reason, channels 8-12 (which included ESPN and ESPN2) didn’t work. The entire flight they just played commercials for Dish Networks. When I asked a flight attendant about this right after take-off, he said he didn’t know what the problem was but he’d see what he could do. Two hours later, right before tip-off I haven’t heard anything and the TV still isn’t working. So I page the flight attendant again, who tells me they have no control over the TV system in the air and they can try calling down to the ground and having them reset it from there. Uhhh, what? How do you design an in-air entertainment service that cannot be reset IN-AIR! Why should some poor bastard on the ground who probably has forty better things to do have to get involved to fix them problem, or not fix the problem in my case since they never did get the TV working. So I decided that I could just watch score updates on ESPN News channel 13. Which worked great until the game actually started and then that channel lost its signal and displayed a blank screen the rest of the flight. Fantastic.

Then there was their ‘revolutionary’ touchscreen entertainment system, which is woefully CPU-bound requiring up to 5 second delays between touching something and actually having it respond. And it was nice to be able to pay 8 dollars for a movie, as opposed to 5 something on Jet Blue. Oh and the inflight food service? Yeah, it is cool you can order food from your seat using the crappy touchscreen, but all the food choices suck and Virgin is charging money for snack-type food that is free on Jet Blue (mmm, free cashews). Plus Jet Blue has more comfortable seats. But at least the mood lighting inside the Virgin plane makes it feel like a gay rave. Great. All around, not impressed with Virgin, except for the power outlet at the seat. That was tight. But I’ll be sticking with Jet Blue for my faux business class jaunts.