One of my favorite amentities of flying are the seat-mounted entertainment systems. Airlines like Singapore and Virgin have made these systems, offering dozens of movies and hundreds of choices, very popular. In fact when I fly an airline that doesn’t offer me my own seatback selections and instead forces me to look at those big screens I say, whoa, I hate this! It’s just better being able to pick your own movies.
Imagine, then, my disappointment at seeing this morning’s USA Today, where a front page article screamed out a warning. My beloved inflight entertainment systems raise safety issues. Say it ain’t so!
The rub is that these systems generate a lot of heat with all of those computers whirring disk drives in the confines of a little seatback.Over the past 10 years more than 400 complaints have been filed by aircraft maintenance staff. In the worst case, smoke from the systems forced pilots to shut them down and make emergency landings!
The story detailed story after story of close calls, smoke and burning odors all as a result of overheated entertainment units. Planes had to land inconveniently, smoke entered cockpits, and in one case in 1998, a plane actually crashed as a result of a fire in the wires blamed on the seatback unit.
A wiring expert named Ed Block says the FAA and the airlines haven’t learned the lessons after all of these grounded planes. He sniffed, “Adding more miles of wire to planes is ‘beyond foolhardy.’ It isn’t a hard choice for me, I’ll take the risk over having to watch what everybody else is watching at 33,000 feet. Doesn’t Ed, like the rest of the traveling public, want to be able to watch up to 70 movies instead of having to watch the latest Tyler Perry disaster on the big screens above the seats?
