I flew Virgin America recently for my holiday trip to New York. Virgin America is a relatively new airline, beginning flights I think this past August or so. I wrote down some notes as I flew, since it was an interesting experience. I also took photos. They're from my iPhone so they're not great, but it gives you an idea.
Everyone has been super-nice, even the guys who work the jetway hauling baby seats down into storage. I'm sure there's a push to brand themselves as the 'nice' airline, and they're trying hard, and very much succeeding.
The mood lighting is very nice, I have to say. It's not as overwhelming as the photos I had seen, which made the whole cabin look bathed in fuschia and violet. The leather seats are black, rather than white, which is very smart; white seats getting used regularly don't stay white. They're white in first class; I'm sure they'll change the casing regularly. UPDATE: now that it's become dark outside, the mood lighting effect is more pronounced. It's gorgeous. I can't tell if they've turned it up or if it's just due to less light leakage.
The illustrations in the airplane safety card are done in exactly the same style as any other airline I've ever been on, but some of the people are subtly hipper. The man using the emergency exits has long sideburns and a nice suit. The floatation device woman is wearing a pink sleeved baby doll tee and jeans. Crash-position dude has a baseball cap, slightly long hair, sideburns and a goatee, and skatewear.
The airplane safety instruction was done via video, which was animated and charming. Everyone were pencil-drawn caricatures. It went a little too far with the cutesy self-awareness. It ended with something like 'We look forward to giving you anything you want, including ending this video.' Still, very enjoyable, although I'll bet I'm going to get sick of it if I fly VA with any frequency.
They're playing mid-90's big beat in the toilets. I'm not sure why the toilets need to have a soundtrack; maybe it's the Virgin America equivalent of the waterfall sound buttons that (I've heard, in both senses) are found in Japanese women's bathrooms. They have small Method soap ads in the bathroom, which feels out-of-place; there hasn't been any other co-branding. UPDATE: after a second trip to the bathroom I'm now convinced that the music in the bathroom is to subconsciously encourage people to not dawdle. It's deliberately frantic music which also fits in with VA's cultivated hipness. It's too bad the bathrooms are not also mood-lit like the rest of the plane. That would be swank.
About Entertainment System (Red)
The Red interface itself is very slick, graphically. Animation is smooth, things are mostly well-organized. I haven't really tried out the chat feature. Some of the features seem like neat ideas that not too many people will use. For example, there's a 'TV chat' in which you get a screen with whatever channel - there's one chat room per channel - and a chat window on the right. In theory you could comment on the show while watching it. I know people who do this over IM at their homes. Argie and Martin used to even make dates to watch shows together, in their respective homes. Here though, it doesn't seem like something you would do unless your friend was seated several rows away from you. Why watch on a square screen?
The touchscreen is really dodgy; fairly unresponsive. The framerate on some of the games is poor (Doom especially) and the controls freeze up sometimes.
The TV offerings are strange. It's nice that there are BBtv episodes, if kind of random. I'm kind of guessing that the BoingBoing crew acted as culture consultants on their entertainment system. That would explain everything being Linux-based, for one. On regular TV there are some channels that apparently VA needs to renew their subscription for as they show up with a message which says pretty much that. They have BBCAmerica, the Sundance channel, and SciFi in addition to your more expected offerings. And, real Cartoon Network! Not Boomerang like on JetBlue. Boomerang is where all the bad crap cartoons go to die.
There is one chat room - everyone gets dumped into the same room. The most I ever saw in there was 2, and nobody responded when prompted. You can also invite individuals to chat. I think this wouldn't really work until users can create their own chat rooms - 'Traveling Alone in Boston' or 'New Parents' (there's a LOT of children aboard, I guess normal for Holiday travel) or 'm4m' of course.
The in-seat power just failed. According to the flight attendant when the entertainment system computers crash (which they did at the same time), they need to reboot them; the power system computers go down at the same time. However, they don't have access to reboot the power system. It's very strange. Not really a disaster, but my power is draining now.
The purchase TV and movie options all showed a mismatch between illustrative picture and text. The Bourne Ultimatum is captioned with Evan Almighty. Basically every single offering was mismatched. Moreover, I watched the BoingBoingTV episodes (which were in the premium section but free, maybe because they're episodic), and it seemed that neither the still nor the copy matched the video. Lord knows what you would end up with if you tried to order The Darjeeling Limited/Hairspray (one pairing); possibly High School Musical 2. There's a small selection of Asian movies as well (I assume subtitled), which is a nice touch.
I just discovered going through the movies that there are about 20 shorts from the Campus Movie Festival, and they're all free. I wish I had found these earlier; I would have been watching them all this time. Some of these even appear to be labeled correctly!
The music selection is reasonably eclectic, and I do really mean that. One screen has The Arcade Fire, Barry Manilow, The Beach Boys, Beck, and Ben Harper - and that's only within Pop/Rock when classified by genre. The classical section is reasonably diverse, featuring Britten, Kronos Quartet, Part, Scriabin (!), Stockhausen (!!1!) among with your standard 3 B's and Mozart and others. The 'Electronica' was not to my taste, but I'm picky. There's a smattering of show tunes and soundtracks, including 'Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?'. The kids section is small but includes Bert and Ernie songs and Schoolhouse Rocks as well as more current stuff. I can't speak to the depth or taste of the Jazz, Hip-hop/R'n'B, or Country/Bluegrass sections, but they all featured a good mixture of classic and current music. Sun Ra, wtf! Basically, the whole thing looks like it was curated by someone(s) with fairly good taste who was also not being snobby about including what tends to be currently popular. There's Ciara and then there's Nina Simone. You know, maybe Ciara is good, I'll give a listen.
The radio stations show a nice collection of genres, and each is illustrated by a cute icon. The New Age & Ambient channel is illustrated by a crescent moon and the word 'Doze' with added 'zzz' above the z.
The games need work. They're all linux-based (that's fine) so they're mostly knock-offs of or riffs on existing games and game concepts. There's a sort of Boulder Dash game, a sort of Asteroids, a sort of Missile Command (called Penguin Command, so awesome). I found that in a lot of the games the controls don't work as expected, or at all. The mapping between the keypad and the games isn't quite up to snuff, and the directions don't help much. It would be nice to see some more familiar licensed games; if they're going to serve Coke and show ESPN, I don't see how it saves them much money or credibility to not just license Zuma and Bejeweled. Multi-player games would be a great concept, but as far as I can tell they weren't happening yet.
There's no in-flight magazine and no Sky Mall. Mostly that's a good thing except I always like doing the puzzles.
On the whole it's very pleasant, entertaining, and comfortable. I had bad first impressions starting with the hour departure delay and the games being fairly shoddy, but most things are actually really cool. There is definitely some polishing up to do, but still, thumbs up, etc.
