Airline Electronics: Rosen-v-Virgin America
Can an airplane match the Bolt Bus as a tech-friendly conveyance? The jury is still out.
Two tech items for today.
1) Power Outlets on Virgin America. This week Jay Rosen, of PressThink and NYU, chose Virgin America for a trip to Las Vegas, in part because of VA's tech-friendly features. It offers wifi internet coverage on all trips -- just like the Bolt Bus! and Acela -- and, also like the bus and the train, has "regular" power outlets at seats. Not just those odd "EmPower" outlets you find on some premium seats on United, American, etc, which put out 15 volt DC power and require a special adapter, but instead a standard socket that (presumably) supplies standard 110 volt AC power.
But to Rosen's dismay, he found that whole banks of the sockets seemed to lose power at intervals throughout the trip. He sent out a Tweet about this in flight -- and, while still in the air and wondering about his battery's reserve, he had a long Twitter-mediated discussion with Virgin America's PR department on whether they were making false claims about their internet-era features. Whole skein after the jump -- Rosen's opening dispatch, and then the followup Direct Messages.Interesting tech aspect for the future: whether airliners as presently equipped (and regulated) could actually handle a whole planeful of AC-power-using passengers. At the moment, Virgin America's apparently can't. The company's Twitter messages to Rosen explain that power is automatically cut to certain users when the load becomes too great. (Rosen's argument: Well, don't advertise that you have power throughout the plane, then.)
Interesting tech aspect for the present: the real-time reputational management that companies or institutions must be prepared for. Obviously Virgin's PR department has alerts set up for blog or Twitter mentions and is ready to respond. No larger point, but an interesting instance.
UPDATE: A reader writes to say that Virgin America really should have replied to a complaint about "unreliable AC power during flight" with a link to this famous Louis C.K. riff on "Everything's Amazing and Nobody's Happy."
The part to notice: the lower right-hand corner announcement that noise-canceling headsets, by Bose, Panasonic, Philips, et al, are perfectly fine to have switched on at any point in the flight.
From a technical point of view, every airline should permit this on every flight at any time. There is no plausible reason to think that noise-canceling headsets could in any way interfere with an airplane's operation. I could give a long explanation, but the short version is: they were invented for pilots to reduce the stress and ear damage that come from exposure to airplane noise. Except in pressurized airplanes where the cockpit has other kinds of noise protection, pilots -- sitting right next to the controls and displays -- are wearing them, switched on, during the whole flight, notably including takeoff and landing. (They also often have their cell phones turned on right next to them, but that's a different story.) Every hour I've spent flying an airplane has been with noise-canceling headsets running -- at various stages, models from David Clark, Lightspeed, and Bose. That's why I can still hear! There is zero possibility that your headset in seat 13D has any effect on a commercial flight.
So why, on other airlines, is there a last-minute war with the flight attendants about switching headsets off? I can imagine one reason: during takeoff and landing, when the flight crew has to entertain the possibility of an evacuation, you want to remove any barrier to getting the passengers' full attention. If an airline explained it that way, OK. But when I've asked attendants about it (nicely!), I've always heard that this is part of the "anything with an Off/On switch must be turned OFF" no-exceptions drill, which makes as much sense as being sure that your digital camera is turned OFF.
This is a tiny point, so why mention it? Because the headsets-off rule has the drawback of other "safety theater" routines: an insistence on pointless restrictions can, over time, undermine respect for the rules that really matter. So congrats to Southwest for a minor but welcome step toward common sense. (For another time: why the "cell phones turned off" rule is slightly more plausible, even though it is obviously never enforced and therefore not taken seriously.)
After the jump, the Rosen-Virgin America chronicles.
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Here is the Twitter stream between Jay Rosen and a Virgin America rep. Newest messages are at the top, so read from the bottom up. It starts, at the bottom, with a Tweet from Rosen to his many followers, and then switches to a Direct Message exchange between him and the company.
