If you were one of the last six people in the country that thought that US Airways was cool, you now have a reason to jump ship: the Tempe, Arizona based company just announced that it was abandoning all of its domestic In Flight Entertainment (IFE) systems and that it will further scrap any plans of ever implementing any.
The culprit, they claim, is the five hundred pounds of extra weight that the systems add to each aircraft, thus taking more fuel to fly around the country.
US Airways: I know that your focus groups and business travelers don’t place that high of a priority on In Flight Entertainment because they like to work on their laptops or crackberry around. But this is AMERICA. Our favorite national past time is watching television. We love it. And the 90% of people that don’t have a laptop, Blackberry or Malcom Gladwell’s last piece of non-fiction are going to get PISSED when their TV’s go away. Do yourself a favor and save one of the last things that you had over the other legacy carriers with no IFE.
If you were still booked on an overseas US Airways flight, you can take down your craigslist posting for your tickets down and breathe a sigh of relief for now — only domestic IFE is going away. But at this rate, who knows how long the airline, proper, is going to last.