Rate your bad flight

by Martha Edwards on

Think about it — what was your worst flight of all time? Mine was just a few months ago — we booked one of those all-inclusive Mexico trips and were a little peeved when we found out that the flight left at 1am. When boarded with bleary eyes, we were surprised at the size of the plane — I’m not exaggerating when I say that if you sit at the window seat, you have to lean to the side because of the curve in the airplane. My guy is 6’2 and we had to trade seats because to sit by the window, he had to slouch painfully.

If that wasn’t bad enough, when the plane took off, it flew north (um, Mr. Pilot, Mexico is south… ) to pick up some passengers from another city because the flight wasn’t full enough. Ok, fine, we can deal with that — but we sat at the airport in that other city for 3 hours, and we weren’t allowed to leave the plane! We didn’t arrive in Mexico until almost noon the next day. Yes, it sucked. But I have to say it was worth it when I got onto that beach.

My point: Everyone has a bad flight story, and now you can rate your flights and post your stories. Check out MyBadFlight.com for stories, ratings, and even the occasional airline celeb sighting! I’ll warn you though — there are some real nightmare stories out there — like being stuck on the tarmac for 12 hours. Good grief!

Would you want to stay connected at 35,000 feet?

by Abha Malpani on

I remember how thrilled I was when wireless became so common place at airports, and although talked about for a few years now, it always surprised me how it hadn’t got onto flights yet. Little did I know that the Internet-on-flights saga has had its twists and turns.

Although never introduced on any American airlines, Internet has been on certain carriers since 2004. The broadband service was initially provided by a Boeing company called Connexion that shut down last year because it didn’t work out to be economically viable — not enough people were making use of broadband Internet in the air.

I suppose things have changed over the last three years and having wireless on aircrafts seems to have come back onto the agenda. From next week, JetBlue Airlines will start offering free email and instant messaging on the aircraft; American Airlines, Virgin America and Alaska Airlines plan to offer wider usage in the following months; and beginning 2008, all Lufthansa long-haul flights will have broadband.

Emirates seems to be leading the pack as it has maintained email and SMS services on its flights since 2004! You don’t even need a laptop, you can do it on a screen behind the seat in front of you. They even have in-seat phones that allow you to call anyone from the sky for US$5 a minute — on average 6,000 calls are made per month, basis which Emirates recently announced that it will be the first airline to allow mobile phone use on board.

Although some awesome material could be gathered from live in-the-sky-blogging, and even though there will be restrictions on connectivity, I don’t see how they would be able to stop people from disturbing others by speaking loudly on the phone or having cybersex through the web-cam. I’m not so sure anymore if I would want this in-flight option, would you?

GADLING TAKE FIVE week of 12-7-07

by Catherine Bodry on

Gadling bloggers have been as busy as Santa’s elves this week. It’s hard to choose five posts from so many, so this week I’m offering five categories:

There you have it! Lots of fun stuff to peruse over your weekend — enjoy it!

Overseas (bargain) shopping trips

by Jerry Guo on

Here’s a story from this week’s New York Times on the rising trend of Europeans flying to New York to bargain shop. What stands out here is not that these are posh socialites getting their fix on 5th Ave. We’re talking about average Joes (more like Janes, I suppose) who fly to the states specifically to take advantage of the depreciating dollar and holiday deals.

Several airlines are apparently offering promotions to encourage this kind of things. For instance, on Silverjet, a roundtrip, business-class ticket was marked at $2,000. Not a bad deal, but sounds like you’ll have to do a heck of a lot of shopping to recoup your startup costs.

Jetblue’s wireless starts next week

by Grant Martin on

To update you on the story that Erik posted earlier, it has been confirmed that JetBlue is launching its wireless product on (one of) their airplanes next week.

But with a hitch.

Due to marketing partnerships that the company has forged with Yahoo and Blackberry, fliers will only be able to check their Yahoo mail wirelessly. They can also use one of two approved Blackberry models to get onto the Jetblue network and check personal and work email, but only on those two models.

My preliminary data indicate that this should make about 7% of Jetblue fliers happy while pissing off the other 93% who don’t use Yahoo mail or a crackberry.

Apparently, general surfing is still not allowed; they haven’t got the bandwidth yet to cover it. Not to worry though — most forward thinking airlines including Alaska Air, Soutwest and Virgin America have plans to integrate wireless in the next year or so. I think that sooner or later Jetblue will open up their bandwidth as well.

Via MSNBC