Jaunted heartthrob Charles Ogilvie continued his celeb spotting on a recent flight to Beijing. And since simply chatting with the NBA's tallest player and China's national hero wouldn't be enough, Charles spoke with Yao Ming entirely in Mandarin. He was nice enough to translate for us:
When Yao Ming returns to the US he will be flying on some test flights to witness Red, Virgin America's famed in-flight entertainment system first-hand and "check out the legroom." He's looking forward to the day when all airlines, including Virgin America, make real-time sports scores available at every seat on every flight.
We're looking forward to that day, too. How 'bout scores via that in-flight WiFi we keep hearing about?
It's no secret that the Virgin Group owns a piece of the Asian low cost carrier, but could Paris be involved too? Or maybe she's more interested in AirAsia's cousin, Virgin America? After all, that airline has invited her on its inaugural WiFi flight scheduled for later this year.
We're trying to sort it all out, but in the meantime, we need to get one of those hats. So hot!
We're taking our time to get it right. We're not just throwing this on our planes like in the lobby of some hotel.
Charles tells us that Virgin should have at least some in-flight WiFi by this fall; the whole fleet will have it by early 2009.
As is the case on AA--but not on JetBlue--you'll be able to surf the whole web from your laptop, and, notably, the VA product will also let you SMS from the seat-back entertainment console. Charles says that once the system is in place--and Paris Hilton helps christen it on the premiere WiFi flight--the carrier will continue to develop its internet offerings. So how long till we're playing video games against our buddies on different Virgin flights?
Besides open skies, in-flight WiFi stands to be one of the biggest travel storylines of the year as heaps of carriers add the service to their fleets in 2008. That means its time for another look at the etiquette of airborne VoIP calls--and what airlines are doing to stop them.
An airborne environment is a confined environment. You don't want 22B yapping away or playing a boom box.
But Europeans, as we know, love their cell phones:
Air France, which plans to start allowing cellular calls through (service provider) OnAir within months, said it would see how people use such services before crafting rules.
What could be even more interesting than the debate over blocked or unblocked phone calls is what sort of filtering software airlines choose to use in the air. Sadly, it'll probably end up being as draconian as DIA's web nanny.
A few days ago Jaunted heartthrob Charles Ogilvie called us up to tell us he was in Asia for a flight on AirAsia. Normally, we'd take that in stride, but Chuck was hopping the inaugural flight between Kuala Lumpur and Vientiane in the company of the airline's CEO, Tony Fernandes (pictured at center), and Association of Southeast Asian Nations Secretary General Surin Pitsuwan (left).
Charles was definitely a fan of the airline, which has a bunch of different carriers unified under one brand banner. (Reminds us of another group of airlines we follow, actually.) He had the chance to ride AirAsia, Indonesia AirAsia and Thai AirAsia--and his full review is just a click away.
Apparently, teaming up with Boing Boing wasn't enough. Virgin America has just sealed a deal with Internet video site Revision3, which produces shows like Diggnation, The GigaOm Show, The Totally Rad Show and Tekzilla. With the announcement, we'd say VA is now officially the country's geekiest airline.
The stuff is sure to be a hit with the San Fran crowd aboard lots of Virgin America flights; the programming will be available starting in March.
For those of you coming from the more traditional entertainment capitals of New York and LA, don't despair. When in-flight entertainment guru Charles Ogilvie wasn't chatting up Paris Hilton at Sundance, he made a deal to get exclusive Sundance Channel programming onto VA flights. Also recently announced: a new line up of Spanish-language content, including Toronto Film Fest award-winner "Bella."
The airline set up shop at the Village at the Yard, which is basically a star-friendly gifting lounge. While we were there, Jessica Alba, Method Man, Perez Hilton and Mischa Barton ex Cisco Adler all dropped by to look through the swag.
And while we had other things happening later that night, VA's Charles Ogilvie kept working the party circuit. Turns out Paris Hilton loves WiFi and wants to try out Virgin's new in-flight system when it debuts. She must not have heard that you can IM from one of JetBlue's planes!
Our very own markj missed out on flying on JetBlue's WiFi-enabled BetaBlue, scheduling his flight just one day too early. But Virgin America's Charles Ogilvie snagged a seat on the Internet-ready Airbus today to check out the competition. (Virgin says they'll have on-board WiFi in 2008.) We managed to chat with him briefly while he was over Maryland and West Virginia:
Jaunted: Hey, Charles, it's Paul Brady at Jaunted. Forgive the pun: What's up?
Charles: Andrea Spiegel, VP Marketing JetBlue, just made a very nice welcome speech and thanked me for being aboard. The product is cool. They have three wireless access points on here.
Charles: The side of the plane is painted up with Blackberry and Yahoo. The LiveTV guys are pretty nice and have been coming over to chat.
Charles: I have two laptops open on a tray table in seat 11C (exit row).
Jaunted: Wow, do you always travel with two laptops?
Charles: I usually travel with multiple devices...They joke in the office that I have one laptop "mounted" to my arm. So far, a "no go" on my WiFi-enabled Blackberry, but I'm working on it.
We had so many other questions, but before we knew it, Charles signed out. Did the connection drop, or did we get the IM cold shoulder? Minutes later, an email arrived explaining what happened:
As we handoff from cell-to-cell, the system seems to drop offline momentarily but restores within five minutes.
If you could access Twitter, Blogger or anything besides Yahoo Messanger and Mail, you could totally liveblog your flight!
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by pbb
