photo credit: Hideki Saito

What is with Qantas in flight entertainment? How hard is it to get a video that plays clearly? This is really the key question at the moment. While the rest of the media is focused on a few safety incidents, where is the outrage and publicity over that most annoying of air travel problems – crappy in flight entertainment?

Perhaps it is a sign that the airline is going down the gurgler because on recent domestic flights on the carrier the entertainment system has malfunctioned or not worked at all. WEE happen to like listening to music through the Qantas system when it is forbidden to have your MP3 player on (and frankly, is that rule still really necessary?). However on recent flights either the sound system didn’t work, the headphones didn’t work or their was an inordinate amount of static across the system.

Then yesterday, as WEE travelled back from Melbourne, Qantas kindly replaced the news service with an episode of Fifth Gear (WEE think that’s the name of the motoring program from the UK). Well they might have well played a video of snow – ‘cos that’s all we were getting out of the projector. I think one of the customer service staff tried to fix it as it turned on and off a couple of times, but in the end they gave up and we were treated to a snowy version of what seemed an interesting race between Jeremy and his pals from one side of Japan to the other.

However, it wasn’t the projector because at the end of the flight they turned on the map thingy and that was crystal clear. So WEE are left surmising that perhaps their VHS video player needs its heads cleaned. Yes, you heard right, their VHS video player. Surely Qantas could replace these players for DVD players? Couldn’t they?

Investment in some new players wouldn’t cost much would it. Dick Smiths has a DVD player for under $50 – maybe they could use that one? And WEE think Fifth Gear is on DVD now. WEE suspect however it is one of these corporate arrangements where the customer comes last – and Qantas doesn’t really give a crap about how annoying this problem is.

WEE know this sounds trivial, but these small things are ones that can actually make a flight go faster because the in flight entertainment is a distraction – and of course sitting in a seat fuming about it can make a flight seem endless.

So WEE are all for a campaign to redress this parlous state of affairs on some Qantas flights – get DVD players. Get into the 21st century Qantas. And let’s face it – if the plane is plummeting towards the earth, WEE would at least prefer to be watching Kath and Kim rather than snow!

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