Whatever you call it - E-Boarding, Mobile Boarding, Electronic Check In - if you haven’t bumped into it yet, you probably will soon. More carriers are supporting this new technology at an ever increasing number of airports.
But how does it work? What are the pitfalls? Check out this article for more info.
(Unless you’re reading this on your tablet or smartphone… You probably already know all about it!)
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?
What causes the near constant delays in air traffic? An answer was given in this month’s issue of Wired, in a long article showing how the FAA plans to add traffic lanes coming out of JFK airport from one lane into a series of lanes, called NextGen, in a wider path. The article shows in a diagram how flights leaving JFK heading west have to stay on a path over central New Jersey, and how a proposed new series of flight paths will take jets further north but spread them out in to six different lanes.
The current system “is a nightmare for NY travelers; delays affect about a third of the area’s flights. Three quarters of all holdups nationwide can be traced back to that tangled swath of East Coast sky.”
It all sounds simple…but of course there is a huge pricetag to anything that’s much better. Each plane would need $300,000 worth of new avionics. 800 new federally-funded ground stations to relay each plane’s location and trajectory to every other plane in the sky would push the project to a $42 billion cost.
That’s what it costs to avoid the predicable delays we all hate. The project should launch around 2025, says the FAA. In the meantime, the agency began the new takeoff headings in 2007, shooting flight plans out in a more expanded radius.
