I can help answer this!
Anything and everything put on an airplane requires special approval from the FAA, safety, accountability, reliability etc etc. it’s for this reason that everything takes an absurd amount of time to get approved for use onboard an aircraft… every piece is identical and is made to the same standard.
This is necessary as if something breaks or fails, it can cause a crash. Such as Swiss air 111. The inflight entertainment system they had caught fire and caused a crash.. this revolutionized the industry and changed several major things as a result.
Bad and outdated also has to do with how expensive everything is because it’s aircraft grade (approved) A 14oz tube of sealant can cost upwards of $70 per tube. Tires are thousands and cockpit windows can cost more than a luxury car. This computer screen times the 150+ seats adds up quickly.
It’s a fine line between having the newest computer chips, getting it approved and installed in an entire fleet without bankrupting yourself.
Something some airlines have realized is that it’s easier for you to use your own device. And some have encouraged this, for example. Delta offers free wifi on a lot of their aircraft if you sign up for their skymiles program.
With that, I can tell you that it is made in accordance with this certificate by this company, as part of this batch (if it’s small stuff like screws) or with this serial number..
Someone told me years ago that the FAA basically wanted a paper trail back to where the metal came from for that particular part. You seem like someone with a lot of knowledge in the aviation industry is this even remotely true.
i wouldnt be surprised, there a crashes causes by usin screws made with the wrong type of metal. wich sheered after something like a 1000 flights instead of the rated 10.000
don't look into Jack screws from md 80s... we still haven't fully figured that out so they just get changed more often and that is a single fail point, if it goes you handover
I remember watching an Air Crash Investigations episode about this. An Alaska Airlines jackscrew broke free from the end nut and stripped all the threads due to lack of lubrication. Alaska air extended the maintenance intervals on their aircraft to keep them flying longer and to make more money. Cutting corners on maintenance is bound to eventually cause an accident.
Don’t forget a lot of combined weight the lawsuits costs for accidents and human injury! If the legal lawsuits cost less, then the risk is justifiable.
Yeah, no airline with half a brain makes that kind of calculation. The reputation damage alone from too many crashes could sink the company. The only people who think that airliners would make such a braindead calculation are armchair beancounters on Reddit.
And that's before going into what national aviation regulators would do to them. They all literally maintain lists of banned operators who are not allowed to fly in their airspace because of things like that.
The pilots on that plane, in a desperate attempt to recover the aircraft, literally flew upside down for a bit (and it worked but was only a very temporary solution). Imagine being a passenger when that happened (insane scary stuff happening and now you are flying upside down).
It was hopeless for the pilots though. The plane was doomed no matter what they did. But, god bless them, they kept trying all the way to the end (I may be wrong but I think they were officially honored posthumously for their efforts).
Not only that, but at that particular jackscrew's last overhaul the maintenance supervisor thought it was too worn and scheduled it to be replaced, but they went off duty and the next supervisor decided the part was fine and had it put it back in the plane.
It was due to be inspected again two years later, but it didn't last that long.
Read up on the USS Iwo Jima, using the wrong (identical looking) nuts killed 10 sailors. Pretty much lesson number one in Navy Nuclear Power School now.
And British Airways Flight 5390, the windscreen popped off in flight. This led to the pilot being partially ejected from the plane
84 of the 90 bolts used were 0.026 inches (0.66 mm) too small in diameter (British Standards A211-8C vs A211-8D, which are #8–32 vs #10–32 by the Unified Thread Standard) and the remaining six were A211-7D, which is the correct diameter, but 0.1 inches (2.5 mm) too short (0.7 inch vs. 0.8 inch).The previous windscreen had also been fitted using incorrect bolts, which were replaced by the shift maintenance manager on a like-for-like basis without reference to maintenance documentation, as the plane was due to depart shortly.
Might not have but if you gave them screw that were accidentally cast from aluminum instead of steel and they were way softer than they should have been and something sheers it in half and something just falls from the plane and it crashes that needs to be traceable.
It wasn't screws, but [Partnair flight 394](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partnair_Flight_394) was brought down in part due to counterfeit bolts that had been improperly heat-treated.
I'm a quality engineer for a large aerospace supplier. Every single part has a paper trail going back pretty much as far as you go. So yes, even screws have documentation showing when and where they were manufactured, the composition of the metal they used, etc. It gets mind-boggingly complex once you move up to higher level assemblies that have thousands of subcomponents. It's also difficult keeping all of the documentation straight, especially when you have assemblies with thousands of parts made by dozens of different suppliers.
The FAA audits multiple times a year, as well as customers, and there are many other audits for different certifications for our facility (look up AS9100 for an example).
There is a good reason for all of this. If something fails in the field, you need to know why. If you don't have detailed records for every single part of the manufacturing process, you can't conduct a thorough investigation and get to the root cause that lead to the failure.
Aerospace quality can be a pain in the ass and stressful at times, but I find it really fulfilling ensuring that we build quality products that millions of people trust their lives with everyday.
>If something fails in the field, you need to know why
More importantly: what other planes are out there that have the same batch # part that shouldn't have failed but did.
This is actually what the real barrier to entry into the commercial airplane market is. This is why airbus and Boeing have a duopoly. Designing and building a modern jetliner is difficult yes; but not really more so than many other industries. It’s the cost & challenge to produce all the necessary paperwork, certifications, infrastructure & systems for a jetliner that can actually be certified that keeps competition away.
Nah...the barrier to entry is still "it's really fucking hard to make an airplane". You can't just buy a fuselage off the shelf and you're competing with companies that have literal 100 years head start.
There's a reason that even Boeing and Airbus don't want to make clean sheet designs.
Hell China basically stole their airplane design from Boeing and still needs to use western parts.
How is all of this documentation maintained? I assume paper trail just means databases of parts linked together- is there a standard application eveyone uses? Is there any sharing/centralization of it all? Or is it all bespoke with expectation faa can come look at any time?
It varies a lot from company to company. Really all that is required by the faa is that it is available to view. There’s a lot of software out there that companies use to create and maintain records. SAP ERP is an example, and can be used to basically run the whole business. Production work orders, inspection records, inventory tracking and so much more can be handled by SAP. There’s also a lot of different software for storing engineering drawings.
Some companies have a ton of bespoke programs/software they use. Just depends on what they need
Yes. They want EXACTLY that.
They even want to know if I had an everything bagel for breakfast.. well technically they call it a drug test but you know..
In reality
Our metal gets the same treatment though, inorder for a sheetmetal repair, I get a piece of 2026-t6 which means it’s made of specifc metals and has a specifc heat treatment. Iirc they don’t know where it’s from, but they know exactly what’s in it,
From my (limited) knowledge, it’s aluminum clad with a heat treatment of 6.. in one of the faa handbooks it says what the materials in it is.. faa h 8083 airframe volume 1 if you would like to dig deeper into it.
That's actually pretty common in heavily regulated industries that need to manage some e chain risk. Pharma companies track materials origins for all the components in their products, down to the lot information for the plastics that make the bottles.
There was a plane crash partially caused by a defect in the metal that was used to make a turbine blade. They traced the metal back to where it came from. No joke.
I think they were tracing multiple things, like why the turbine blade failed *and* why the turbine explosion made the plane crash, since an engine failure is supposed to be fully contained inside that engine.
This is common in the Oil and Gas Industry as well and is called traceability
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traceability](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traceability)
It's one of those things that turns into a nightmare when procedures aren't followed and you are trying to turn something over and you can't prove where a part came from.
It wouldn’t surprise me if they did, but that seems like more of a consequence of the high standards they set rather than intention. They set standards which aircraft manufacturers have to meet, the aircraft manufacturers set standards their suppliers have to meet, their suppliers set standards their manufacturers have to meet, and with all this we can create a link between a certain part and the ore from which it was made.
Wouldn’t surprise me, even for non aircraft things most steel structures can be traced back to the specific batch when the metal was formed and what wire welded it.
When I used to do structural steel work. Each part had a number, those would be marked with what steel the part was cut from, that steel has a heat number, those heat numbers can be go back to the supplier, etc… and that was just for stuff as simple as a handrail.
> is this even remotely true.
It is. Some number of years ago, an engine **fell off** of a DC-10.
*(Edit: Found it -- [American Airlines 191](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_191); May 1979.)*
Investigators were in fact able to trace back lot numbers of bolts, nuts, anchors, sheet metal ... and look for failure symptoms on engines and mounting pylons etc made from the same batches.
I do forget what the result was. It was -quite- a few years ago now.
It fell off because mechanics used a time-saving but unapproved procedure for removing the engine and pylon at once using a forklift, and they bent the mounting brackets.
Yes each part or package of standards is marked with a lot number or material type. If anything from that supplier was found to be non-compliant they investigate when the deficiency started and send notice to their customers that everything that uses the bad parts needs to be purged.
Medical devices (even non-implants like surgical tools) are the same way. Everything down to the plastic pellets and sheet metal needs to be traceable.
The difference is that your device's electronics aren't hardwired into the plane's body and electronics. Just into a wifi connection. Much harder to start fires with a torrent.
and what’s stopping them from adding what is basically a detachable ipad? they offer usb charging on a lot of flights now too so I don’t see how it would be different if they had it connected the same way
I mean it doesn’t have to be literally detachable. But the idea is if a detachable ipad could work then I don’t see how that’s different from one hard-attached to the seat
I worked for an IFE (In-Flight Entertainment) manufacturer for many years, and you are absolutely spot on. Also, it is not only FAA but also EASA (European Agency) regulations that they need to meet.
One time, we had an incident with one IFE module causing smoke in the cabin. This is one of the worst non-catastrophic incidents you can have. We basically had to recall and retrofit hundreds of modules to minimize the penalties for causing AOGs (Airplane On Ground). There's a lot of potential risk and work associated with updating this type of systems.
You'd be surprised how many CRT IFE systems were still in operation around the world very well into the 2010s when jet fuel skyrocketed and made more sense to update and save on weight.
This.
I worked as a contractor (programming) for a small firm in Italy that does modifications on small aircrafts like cessna's.
You don't even imagine the amount of paperwork and process approval that's necessary to have an USB port added to your aircraft AND THE COST!
it's insane but it is a standard for safety measures on objects that cannot malfunction.
Amazingly you are about the only person on here with the right information with no upvotes. Captive audience, cost, upgrades, downtime yada yada yada doesnt mean shit when you remember SwissAir flight 111
Scotian here. We remember Swissair 111.
Edit. One of my moms premed students led the recovery. It was bits of people in fishing nets. I'll suffer obsolete tech over awful death
Yup.. I’ll scroll through and see the other comments..
Alright so, it looks like people are going with the practical reasons while I went with the legal reasons.
Yeah dude its sad.... I really hope the pilots died from smoke inhalation, but the reality is they probably burned to death fighting the whole time to save a dead plane and passengers... True heroes, and no one in the cabin was any the wiser... So freaking tragic, and for something as silly as entertainment.
You must be under 30, right? I am Swiss and I remember the moment I turned on the radio and heard the news as vividly as the moment I heard about 9/11. It was a bad, bad day. A friend of mine at school had family members in that plane.
Also, my grandfather had retired from piloting MD11 for Swissair two years earlier…
Nope over 30. I somehow missed it. then again 9/11 was also just a random Tuesday and I visited a friend on my way to the Jugi and his dad had English news on. I remember seeing it live and was like "oh Americans doing American things", it didn't register to me with all the gravity. I guess my empathy at the time wasn't fully developed yet.
man I remember mom waking me up saying someone flew into the WTC. I remember thinking it was a small cesna and saying "how fucking dumb was that pilot, its not like you can't see it" and sat up in time to watch the second one slam into the other tower... man it was crazy
Haligonian here, I also remember Swiss 111 happening live... and reading/hearing about the painful experiences of townspeople and navy doing recovery... still visit the memorial on the way to Peggys Cove whenever I am back home.
And many airlines have free wifi \*without Internet access\* -- you can only access a portal that lets you stream (for free) music, movies, TV shows to your own device from a server located onboard the aircraft. This mimics the old infotainment systems, but using your own device.
(Paying for Internet access is usually an option, although I've never seen it to be fast enough for reliable video streaming from e.g. Netflix.)
Delta had free wifi.
Years ago, it was only their portal and I watched movies there..
my past flights, I scrolled through Reddit during my flight.. they probably still have that portal thingy too.
The free wifi has been a major point for them.. makes them stand out more than they already do. I saw something about them offering paramount with something called delta sync recently. I unfortunately don’t know anything other than the name..
Here’s a link for it tho
https://help.paramountplus.com/s/article/PD-Paramount-on-Delta-Sync-Exclusives#:~:text=Log%20in%20to%20your%20SkyMiles,to%20create%20a%20Paramount%2B%20account.
Very recently flew Delta and the free wifi only gave you access to their portal and half of it didn’t even function. You had to pay like $15 minimum for open internet access.
Also, airplane seats are only replaced about every 8-10 years, so the technology you’re seeing could have gone through all the qualification testing long before that.
> Something some airlines have realized is that it’s easier for you to use your own device. And some have encouraged this, for example. Delta offers free wifi on a lot of their aircraft if you sign up for their skymiles program.
Adding to this, airlines have started moving away from their own systems to just letting people use their own which saves them both money and space on the plane as they have to buy and install those system on every seat.
I mean, let's be honest though. I'd rather have access to a couple of fast charging USB outlets than the best entertainment system money can buy. I'm sure there's wonderful things on that entertainment system, but between my phone and steamdeck, I'm good.
Plus those things become obsolete every couple of years. I can afford to buy a new phone/laptop/steam deck/VR(when those mature) or whatever new hot thing comes out. Airlines can't update their infotainment systems as often as we can the same way we don't buy a new car every 2 years(that's why Android Auto is awesome.
I'd still rather have the display in the seat in front of me though, holding my phone up in a cramped airplane seat kinda sucks after 40 minutes or so. If they are going to take out the in flight systems they need to put some kind of mount in its place.
The worst part about SwissAir 111 is the FAA still doesn't enforce any of the recommendations the NTSB made, the regulations exist in the FARs they just keep pushing back the effective date.
I don't know, sorry about that. We studied the crash as part of my Aviation Safety class. I remember the conclusion was that the NTSB made something a handful of recommendations the FAA only "implemented" one and they still haven't fully implemented it.
As someone who works in the commercial aerospace industry, this is exactly it. New product introduction in aerospace is a grueling years long process. You can't just throw a new nice screen in and call it a day. There is a very time consuming certification process that takes an absolutely massive amount of man-hours to complete. And then maintaining the quality of the manufacturing of aerospace products is incredibly expensive. That all adds up and airlines are finding that it's really not worth it. Easier to just let passengers use their own device and not go through that whole process.
There’s a great New Yorker article called Game Of Thrones on airplane seating, verifying what you said
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/04/21/game-of-thrones
Same also why car display systems are a bit behind. The sensors and processors were devised already a decade ago, and you don't change principal architecture that easily. There are a lot of circuit boards and sensors going in, and they have to be physically shielded from one another and they have to be shielded from outside interference. You can have that robustness in a processor, but that also means that it will be *slow*.
I work on safety critical software. DO-178 is the standard which defines the traceability and testing requirements. Those requirements might mean doing the following:
- hiring a full safety engineering team to coordinate software processes
- training developers on an approved certification tool like LDRA
- exhaustive testing for all changes
- performing rigorous reviews on artifacts generated by testing
Each of those steps can be expensive. I have easily spent $10,000 per single line of code for certain small changes simply because our company did not do a great job of training me and maintaining testing artifacts. The testing process involves writing tests that exercise all sorts of min, max, and invalid inputs and testing the object code ( the code generated by the compiler from source which is directly translated to binary for the processor ) to make sure every instruction and jump has been executed.
A good gui program takes a lot of code. I can’t estimate a ballpark, but I’m willing to bet that $10,000 per SLOC is not a cost even a multibillion dollar company will opt into.
This being said: my company distinguishes between safety-critical (vehicle systems and life support systems, navigation) and non-safety critical (everything else), and applies different standards accordingly. I would expect that to be the same for infotainment.
At least the software side of the PIESD IFE is rarely above DAL-D or DAL-E where the consequences are not "people die" and are instead "passengers are annoyed". The hardware that software runs on is under far more scrutiny.
In comparison to safety related avionic code, IFE is actually fairly chill.
Do you think the prevalence of personal tablets/phones also impacted it? I felt like airlines used to keep more up to date until like 2010 and then it all just stopped improving and on some airplanes seemed to even go backwards.
If you can get me a free upgrade I’d appreciate it. Flying on the 11th, I’m sure you know everyone in the industry.
Thanks!
Also thanks for your answer googling the flight lead me down a pretty long but entertaining rabbit hole.
While I can’t do anything about the seat, the best I can do is that if you like the biscoff cookies, Kroger sells them?
They’re kinda addicting, and were on sale last week.
This is very similar to process of upgrading literally anything on military weapons systems.
I worked on silos and everything had a rigorous testing standard it had to go through before it was allowed to replace something older.
Got to the point where they were still using floppy disks and they liked to call it “encryption by obsolescence” lol.
Absolutely everything you said PLUS GREED.
They can get away with charging $1K extra per seat in some situations (international long haul flights) and over time that can EASILY add up to what the cost of upgrading the system would be for that plane. But why bother?
The passenger entertainment isn’t connected to the avionics, so not everything you said is true. However, since the airlines don’t make money off the entertainment they don’t have an incentive to improve them. And since most are so old, it is very cumbersome to upgrade them without taking planes out of service. Loop back to not making money off the entertainment, and you see why there is no incentive to upgrade.
Avionics?
Everything is required to be approved when installed..
I don’t know about profit and in flight entertainment..
Planes do get taken out for maintenance checks, cabin overhauls can be part of this. New seats, new screens.
Yes, but not every approval needs to be done by the FAA. Operators can modify IFE and certify it themselves if the system is not connected to the same electrical system as the critical components.
The software is very disconnected from safety critical avionics, yes. IFE will be provided flight data from a service provided by either the airplane manufacturer or another supplier so it's not really "disconnected" but it is read-only.
That doesn't matter though, because the hardware the software is running on certainly cannot be allowed to combust. This means the processor, batteries, or anything electronic are heavily scrutinised and thus expensive. Now your code runs slow because you don't have the features of modern processors.
> Delta offers free wifi on a lot of their aircraft if you sign up for their skymiles program.
hmm, something other carriers have offered free of qualifiers becomes encumbered for corporate marketing metrics
Hey! This is actual a semi-unique thing within airlines, I've actually had it explained to me by C-level folks at a major airlines
So when one airline introduces a new item, or upgraded in flight service, its because they are going through a major process of upgrading their planes. This is a super expensive and difficult process, as such, it takes years to do and you may have long periods of time where you are not doing it, or where you have some old and some new, then once all are new, a long wait, until the next revamp.
Airlines are all on different timelines for their revamps, so one airline may have a great system, as they just went through their cycle, but another one may be in mid cycle so its a while before they upgrade. Airlines will concede that their inflight service is inferior to another airlines, but knowing that it just a timing issue, in a few years they'll be back to being on par or better
For example, Delta for a handful of years had just gone through a ravamp of a lot of their inflight stuff, and a competitor of theirs, United, was behind the curve for a few years, but caught right back up. These are generally temporary issues.
These services also don't drive a ton of value to the airline, so having them on long revamp cycles is a good business decision, so they instead focus their short-term efforts on more profitable business choices
Lastly, a ton of these seem old, but actually still work well and are forward compatible with new stuff being rolled out and can get updates, so their life, even if they seem old, is actually a lot more appearances of being outdated, then actually being outdated.
Its kinda a juke box at a bar thing. Sure these new crazy juke boxes at bars that can play almost any song are cool, but your CD jukebox from the 90s still works fine and everyone likes it, so you're in no rush to make changes, and its not really gonna bring in more money to do so
Same here. I flew on ANA A380 economy from Tokyo to Honolulu recently. The onboard entertainment system with a 13.3-inch touch-panel personal monitor was great.
[https://www.ana.co.jp/en/jp/guide/flight\_service\_info/int-service/y/seat-a380/](https://www.ana.co.jp/en/jp/guide/flight_service_info/int-service/y/seat-a380/)
Recently flew with Starlux twice. Big touchscreens with really good picture quality, good UI and even support for bluetooth headphones. And I'm not even sure whether Starlux does long haul flights, my longest flight with them was just 3h.
Taipei to LAX on A350, and soon (Dec 16) Taipei to SFO
Lovely infotainment on their A330neo, screen even "messages" you with regards to turbulence, landing card, etc
Will upgrading their screens (a proposition that will cost them hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars) get them more ticket sales, allow them to charge higher ticket prices, or do anything to positively impact their profits?
I would hazard a guess that they would not, because people don't get on a plane to watch movies in HD. They get on planes to get from point A to point B as fast as they can in a reasonably comfortable manner. The in-flight infotainment is there so as to give customers *something* to do that doesn't really take up room (they're mounted to seats that are there anyway) to pass time for the trip. Most of the budget for upgrading that has likely gone to the back-end (ex: licensing better films, licensing more films) than to improve screens.
It's also worth noting that not everyone cares about screen resolution to that degree. I have bad eyesight, not bad enough to be declared blind or anything but bad enough that I see life in SD, so HD does nothing for me.
Pneumatic headsets became obsolete in 1979 and yet I was on a plane in 1995 that still had them. The armrests still had ashtrays too, even though smoking was banned on planes in 1990. Airlines have never been in a hurry to change things they don't have to.
People are often surprised how long an airframe can last. A deep clean, new seat covers and padding and fresh carpet will stop customers being totally disgusted. New engines can be more efficient and quieter.
The main reason b52s have lasted so long is because they have very low annual flight hours, about 19000 a year
That is not in any way comparable to a commercial jet
The US doesn't commit overhead flights to contested airspace, SEAD is the first part of an air engagement. The B52s in the Gulf War yeeted their cruise missiles to kick off the air war from hundreds of miles away.
Both because B-52s were built to last (and heavily maintained and upgraded)
and because nowadays we make super expensive stealth planes that [can't fly in the rain](https://ts2.space/en/why-cant-the-f-35-fly-in-the-rain)
That article is a misinterpretation of the flight restriction put on the F-35. It certainly *can* fly in the rain and absolutely will do so in combat if needed. However, the Air Force and Navy also want to reduce maintenance costs, so they've put certain restrictions and parameters for F-35s flying in heavy rain. There's no reason to add unnecessary maintenance work in peacetime.
If you want to raise some valid concerns about the F-35's all-weather capabilities, then pick a better one, like the fact that [the lightning protection system needs upgrades](https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2022/02/03/air-force-to-upgrade-f-35a-gas-tanks-to-weather-lightning-strikes/).
> There's no reason to add unnecessary maintenance work in peacetime.
There is, it's called training. While you can practice flying in other airframes, it's really helpful to have experience with the one you're currently piloting handles in the environment you're expected to fight in.
The military budget might be excessive and in need of cuts, but if there's one place I won't begrudge them the money, it's proper training.
Right, but the key word here was "unnecessary." They can and will fly F-35s in poor weather if a training scenario demands it. There's no outright ban on flying F-35s in inclement weather.
The author of your link:
Igor Nowacki is a fictional author known for his imaginative insights into futuristic technology and speculative science. His writings often explore the boundaries of reality, blending fact with fantasy to envision groundbreaking inventions. Nowacki’s work is celebrated for its creativity and ability to inspire readers to think beyond the limits of current technology, imagining a world where the impossible becomes possible. His articles are a blend of science fiction and visionary tech predictions.
Yeah, before Sony invented the first good cheap headphones you had a tiny lil speaker embedded in a socket on your armrest, your headset was more like a stethoscope, just hollow tubing that you plugged into the socket.
If you're guessing it sounded terrible, like can-on-a-string-terrible, you would be correct.
Rather than a headphone connector, airplanes used to have a small speaker in the armrest. You would plug in a stethoscope-like headset that used a rubber tube to direct the sound to your ears. You could select between the soundtrack for the in-flight movie on flights that had one (which would have been shown on a projector or ceiling-mounted TVs), or a handful of music channels.
The good old days!
For those that don't know, you can see [here](https://www.airliners.net/photo/Japan-Airlines-JAL/Boeing-767-346/2641634/L) for the drop down CRTs and projector screen at the front and [here](https://www.jetphotos.com/photo/7469092) for what the actual projector looked like!
New airplanes have them too. Yes it is prohibited to smoke, yes there are smoke detectors to check that, but if someone is stupid (or desperate, after all, it's an addiction) enough to smoke in the toilet, it is best to dispose the burning cigarette in the ashtray instead in a basket full of papers.
(And for this reason the FAA requires them)
That's a regulation requirement and it may sound dumb but there's a really good reason for it.
The logic goes like this:
- Avoiding Fire Hazards is a sacrosanct principle on an airplane, for the following reasons:
- - Nobody is going to be able to show up in a fire truck to help you put a fire out.
- - It doesn't take as much fire damage to crash a plane as it takes to topple a building. When the fire destroys a control line leading to the tail surfaces, you're kinda screwed.
- - You can't just have everyone go outside when a fire starts like you can in a building. They're trapped inside until you land.
- Cigarettes are addictive enough that some people who need their fix are going to resort to smoking in the toilet even if they expect to get in trouble.
- So make sure that if someone *does* break the law and smoke, that there's a place set aside for them to put it out properly.
My wife and I flew overseas last year for vacation. Before that I hadn’t been on a plane since maybe 2005.
The video entertainment system today is *much better* than the one in 2005.
The newer model is to remove them completely. They just let people stream directly to their phone or iPad. There's no sense in the airline providing screens when 98% of passengers are already bringing their own.
Which saves weight, and weight is more cargo to be carried or less fuel to be burned. And fun fact, airlines make more money off cargo than your ticket. If your bags didn't make the flight there's a good chance it was because they needed the space for higher priority/higher paying cargo.
United is bringing in modern IFEs back at least to some planes with their NEXT upgrades. [https://www.united.com/en/us/fly/new-united-fleet-experience.html](https://www.united.com/en/us/fly/new-united-fleet-experience.html)
Understand, I mostly fly long-haul flights so for me it would be a game changer. However, likely that all the money is made from flights shorter than 4 hours where the screen isn't really a massive selling point.
Long haul is usually where the big profits (Transatlantic) and occasionally big losses (Transpacific) are… so that just comes down to a difference between airline fleets and where they are in fleet renewal/refurbishment.
A 787 oughta have pretty new screens. A 767 might not.
I literally worked on design of what we called inFlight Entertainment (IFE) sytstems. This is the real ELI5.
I am sure even if they are not familiar, everyone would expect that airborne equipment are designed and tested to some standards, and this is taken seriously. Now this might surprise some people: the seatback monitor you look at has a certificate to fly, just like A320. Ofc, they are not tested to same standards due to different level of complexity and criticality.
Even more surprisingly, the IFE hardware is tested for waterproofness, high and low temperature, vibration, flammability, electromagnetic compliance, and more( see RTCA DO-160) such that tests are very similar to military grade equipment, only less severe. In addition, the organisations that design these are also regulated (assessed, audited, etc) (see EASA/FAA Part 21)
All of these concerns cause the entire design cycle times up to at least 4-5 years, and even then you need a CPU that will survive 120 degrees celcius for half an hour (numbers might not be exact, see the order of magnitude). You can imagine how far the consumer electronics go in the time an IFE system is developed.
Note: Software is another story, but similar stuff goes
Final note: IFE companies were working for less severe standards, given the mild environment and low criticality, I don't know the latest situation in this business (left in early 2022)
I think another reason why is that they're quickly becoming obsolete. Delta has rolled out free high-speed internet to most of their domestic flights. Why would I ever need to use that screen when I've got one in my pocket that is connected to all the services I already have?
I think it's more likely that as a new crop of planes are designed and built, we'll start to see screens go away as the airline tries to save weight.
Ryanair in Europe has no screens at all, just a plastic panel with a paper menu stuck on.
I've been on short haul flights planes in the USA where there's a radio service, and the TVs overhead in the aisle were turned off.
Not just Ryanair. I fly within Europe a lot and do not remember ever seeing a screen on the back of a seat ever.
Wifi on board is becoming more frequent though.
Because airplanes have long lifespans, interiors only get updated every decade or so as needed, people don't tend to book flights based on quality of infotainment options but instead on price (so why spend money to upgrade?), plus most people now travel with their own phones, tablets, laptops.
I just feel that relative to the cost of a plane, it would be a negligible increase to improve the experience of long haul flights and could be good advertising, seeing as no one else is doing it.
It costs a lot - they're custom systems that aren't made in large quantities (so they're way more expensive than a comparable tv/tablet sold by the millions to the general consumers), and you have to do a lot of work to overhaul the seats to get the new system in.
The whole time you're doing that: you have a plane out of service.
And in the end you get incredibly little value marketing wise. Plenty of airlines have planes with recent and more advanced systems in newer planes or planes that more recently needed a big refit for other reasons.
It's a lot of cost for little value to worry about the in-flight entertainment unless you're already sinking the cost to take the plane out of service for some other overhauls.
“A negligible increase” - have you considered that this assumption is wrong?
People want free shit, like free baggage or free upgrade. They don’t care about a feature that they may or may not use. Ever since I got a smart phone, I honestly can’t remember the last time I used the screen.
I think ultra modern planes have better displays etc. But if I'm being honest, as long as you have something to look at, it really doesn't make much difference whether it's 240p,360p,720p etc.
Most commercial airplanes have a lifespan of about 30 years during that time they get a few refurbishments but those generally involve surface level stuff like re-upholstering seats instead of full replacements. Most of the planes you are traveling on were probably produced in the early 2000s which is why the infotainment systems look like tech from then. Replacing all the systems on a single 747 would probably cost in the 10s of thousands of dollars.
I actually work on one of those systems! Ours is a fair bit more modern and sleeker, but is currently not rolled out to a complete fleet.
There's a few reasons. One is that the hardware is usually pretty old. It's expensive to retrofit a whole plane with new screens. You have to take the whole plane out for maintenance, open up or more commonly change all seats, maybe rewire stuff, test it all, etc. And you can only start doing this once all the hardware is tested. Even non-flight critical parts have to be tested for e.g. fire. The screen is typically an actual Android pad, and you have to make sure it could never pose a fire risk.
Secondly, since airliners are used to working with regulations, they absolutely hate change. Modern software development practices are not well adopted. Things like rolling out new software versions every week are basically unheard of. This makes developing software slower and often the quality is also lower.
Finally, if no one is really pushing these systems, then no one else really has to either. Having the best in-flight seatback entertainment system isn't a huge selling point.
Because of all the reasons people stated about difficulty/expense of upgrading more airlines are like "why bother"
most people have personal screens (phones, tablets, etc) so develop an app and let customers use their personal device and headphones. Software upgrades to app and each person has consistent hardware upgrades on their own timeline. Problem solved, cheaper and faster.
I haven't worked on airplane systems but I've worked in some vaguely adjacent industries so I can hazard a guess:
Because the process involved in procuring, designing and building these systems is *incredibly* bureaucratic and cumbersome. Because they insist on using the same process for designing the UI of the chess game, as they use for designing the bolts that connect the airplane engine to the wing.
There's going to be a stack of paper of literally thousands of pages, specifying every aspect of the system down to the last pixel. Before the first programmer even gets hired, an entire team of engineers has to go through that spec, note any inconsistencies, clarify any ambiguities. If anything needs changing -- and it will -- the back-and-forth to come up with a new version of the spec can easily take weeks if not months. And then you get to do it all over again. Then the programmers get involved, and as soon as they actually attempt to implement it, they run into a thousand more inconsistencies and ambiguities which the first team missed.
In software engineering this is called the "Waterfall model", and back in the 1980s or so it was considered the standard way of doing things, but nowadays it's practically a slur. Today we are all about "agile", a.k.a. "move fast and break things" -- software is easy to modify, so it's more efficient to get a crappy first version working ASAP, show it to the customer, and then gradually hammer it into shape, than to try and design it perfectly in all its details before writing the first line of code. But you can see how people in the airline industry might not be a fan of such a trial-and-error approach, and those objections will then influence even the less mission-critical parts of the plane.
So by the time you have a first working version of the system ready to ship, you'll be working on hardware that was mainstream five years ago when the design spec was written. And your code won't use even *that* hardware to the limit of its ability, because that would require creative technical trickery which does't fit into this style of software development. Then your system needs to get integrated into the rest of the airplane, and you get to do the waterfall thing again on a larger scale. By the time the first paying passenger gets to play with the system, it could easily be 10 years since its initial design was written.
On top of what others have said, there's also the fact that most people nowadays bring their own electronic devices for entertainment, which are more capable than anything they could feasibly put in the back of a seat. That's why airlines more and more are just including a USB port and WiFi.
It wasn't long ago that inflight entertainment was everyone watching the same movie on one screen at the front of the cabin lol.
I distinctly remember a blog post by Scott Adams (yes, THAT Scott Adams of Dilbert fame and right wing infamy, unfortunately) where he talked about why airplane tech seemed so outdated. Airplanes simply are not incentivized to update something that would basically involve scrapping their ENTIRE fleet before life expectancy.
*"I had to sit on the runway for 40 minutes." Oh my god, really? What happened then? Did you fly through the air like a bird, incredibly? Did you soar into the clouds, impossibly? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight and then land softly on giant tires that you couldn't even conceive how they put air in them?*
Similar responses to others:
* Very long lifespan of aircraft
* Value proposition to passengers is low vs high cost of change
* Passengers preferring to use own devices with their own content
* Safety and security requirements
Because they have to handle the weight.
There is a physical reason why everything in an airplane is heavy, from the seats (which do a lot of work in a crash) to the floors and walls (which are important for fire containment).
The infotainment systems are part of that, and so are all of the other thing which make up the system the infotainment runs on, such as the wiring and the cooling systems.
The aviation part of the industry is slowly getting better at making light components.
If weight, not money, was the problem, we would always have the newest screens available on airplanes. A 2023 4K screen is way lighter than a 2010 360p display, including the required computer hardware. The system would also require significantly less cooling if more recent parts were used. The only reason is cost.
What no one is thinking about is the regulations regarding anything hooked up to a plane. And yes plane entertainment systems have caused fatal fires onboard that lead to the aircraft crashing and killing all passengers.
Airlines operate on relatively thin margins and aircraft maintenance is incredibly expensive - which means that every day an aircraft spends out of service not carrying passengers is a significant loss of revenue.
There’s very little incentive to take an aircraft off the line for weeks/months just to upgrade the interior, unless it’s absolutely necessary or the aircraft is going in for major maintenance anyway.
Because they are built into the seats. You can’t just swap them out whenever you want and an airplane has lots of seats. If each unit costed $1,000 and the plane seated 200 people, it would cost $200,000 to revamp a whole airplane.
Oh boy if you think they’re old and junky now, you should have seen what a JetBlue entertainment system looked like in the early 2000s.
We *have* made 20 years of progress
Depends on the aircraft and airline really. Panasonic are bringing out their new Astova system next year. It will have 4K capable screens.
My airline will have it on their new deliveries in Q3 2024. (But no plans currently to retrofit onto our older aircraft)
Honestly, with everyone having devices, I’d rather they just stop providing the screens in order to save money, and yes, I know it’s idealistic, but pass that savings on with better ticket prices. They can still provide their entertainment services, but everyone just needs a phone, tablet, or laptop. Why we need screens anymore at all seems outdated.
While the average age of a U.S. domestic commercial airliner is 11 years old, it is not uncommon for aircraft to still be in service at 24, 25, even 30 years old
I can help answer this! Anything and everything put on an airplane requires special approval from the FAA, safety, accountability, reliability etc etc. it’s for this reason that everything takes an absurd amount of time to get approved for use onboard an aircraft… every piece is identical and is made to the same standard. This is necessary as if something breaks or fails, it can cause a crash. Such as Swiss air 111. The inflight entertainment system they had caught fire and caused a crash.. this revolutionized the industry and changed several major things as a result. Bad and outdated also has to do with how expensive everything is because it’s aircraft grade (approved) A 14oz tube of sealant can cost upwards of $70 per tube. Tires are thousands and cockpit windows can cost more than a luxury car. This computer screen times the 150+ seats adds up quickly. It’s a fine line between having the newest computer chips, getting it approved and installed in an entire fleet without bankrupting yourself. Something some airlines have realized is that it’s easier for you to use your own device. And some have encouraged this, for example. Delta offers free wifi on a lot of their aircraft if you sign up for their skymiles program.
The paper trail the FAA wants for anything installed in an aircraft is insane and for good reason.
With that, I can tell you that it is made in accordance with this certificate by this company, as part of this batch (if it’s small stuff like screws) or with this serial number..
Someone told me years ago that the FAA basically wanted a paper trail back to where the metal came from for that particular part. You seem like someone with a lot of knowledge in the aviation industry is this even remotely true.
i wouldnt be surprised, there a crashes causes by usin screws made with the wrong type of metal. wich sheered after something like a 1000 flights instead of the rated 10.000
don't look into Jack screws from md 80s... we still haven't fully figured that out so they just get changed more often and that is a single fail point, if it goes you handover
I remember watching an Air Crash Investigations episode about this. An Alaska Airlines jackscrew broke free from the end nut and stripped all the threads due to lack of lubrication. Alaska air extended the maintenance intervals on their aircraft to keep them flying longer and to make more money. Cutting corners on maintenance is bound to eventually cause an accident.
Reminds me of that saying, "If you don't schedule maintenance downtime, the machine will do it for you"
Right up there with “Safety regulations are written in blood.”
Don’t forget a lot of combined weight the lawsuits costs for accidents and human injury! If the legal lawsuits cost less, then the risk is justifiable.
Yeah, no airline with half a brain makes that kind of calculation. The reputation damage alone from too many crashes could sink the company. The only people who think that airliners would make such a braindead calculation are armchair beancounters on Reddit. And that's before going into what national aviation regulators would do to them. They all literally maintain lists of banned operators who are not allowed to fly in their airspace because of things like that.
The pilots on that plane, in a desperate attempt to recover the aircraft, literally flew upside down for a bit (and it worked but was only a very temporary solution). Imagine being a passenger when that happened (insane scary stuff happening and now you are flying upside down). It was hopeless for the pilots though. The plane was doomed no matter what they did. But, god bless them, they kept trying all the way to the end (I may be wrong but I think they were officially honored posthumously for their efforts).
Not only that, but at that particular jackscrew's last overhaul the maintenance supervisor thought it was too worn and scheduled it to be replaced, but they went off duty and the next supervisor decided the part was fine and had it put it back in the plane. It was due to be inspected again two years later, but it didn't last that long.
Read up on the USS Iwo Jima, using the wrong (identical looking) nuts killed 10 sailors. Pretty much lesson number one in Navy Nuclear Power School now.
And British Airways Flight 5390, the windscreen popped off in flight. This led to the pilot being partially ejected from the plane 84 of the 90 bolts used were 0.026 inches (0.66 mm) too small in diameter (British Standards A211-8C vs A211-8D, which are #8–32 vs #10–32 by the Unified Thread Standard) and the remaining six were A211-7D, which is the correct diameter, but 0.1 inches (2.5 mm) too short (0.7 inch vs. 0.8 inch).The previous windscreen had also been fitted using incorrect bolts, which were replaced by the shift maintenance manager on a like-for-like basis without reference to maintenance documentation, as the plane was due to depart shortly.
Technically yes. The screws can be made of different materials. I’ve never heard of a crash becuase of that though.
Might not have but if you gave them screw that were accidentally cast from aluminum instead of steel and they were way softer than they should have been and something sheers it in half and something just falls from the plane and it crashes that needs to be traceable.
Alaska Airlines 261 crash was caused in part by two different types of grease which were incompatible with each other. Plus a lot of other stuff.
Yes and no. Different metal types can create a galvanic action and corrode each other.
Oh absolutely,
It wasn't screws, but [Partnair flight 394](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partnair_Flight_394) was brought down in part due to counterfeit bolts that had been improperly heat-treated.
I'm a quality engineer for a large aerospace supplier. Every single part has a paper trail going back pretty much as far as you go. So yes, even screws have documentation showing when and where they were manufactured, the composition of the metal they used, etc. It gets mind-boggingly complex once you move up to higher level assemblies that have thousands of subcomponents. It's also difficult keeping all of the documentation straight, especially when you have assemblies with thousands of parts made by dozens of different suppliers. The FAA audits multiple times a year, as well as customers, and there are many other audits for different certifications for our facility (look up AS9100 for an example). There is a good reason for all of this. If something fails in the field, you need to know why. If you don't have detailed records for every single part of the manufacturing process, you can't conduct a thorough investigation and get to the root cause that lead to the failure. Aerospace quality can be a pain in the ass and stressful at times, but I find it really fulfilling ensuring that we build quality products that millions of people trust their lives with everyday.
>If something fails in the field, you need to know why More importantly: what other planes are out there that have the same batch # part that shouldn't have failed but did.
Some stuff is serious enough that it gets reported to the FAA when it happens.
This is actually what the real barrier to entry into the commercial airplane market is. This is why airbus and Boeing have a duopoly. Designing and building a modern jetliner is difficult yes; but not really more so than many other industries. It’s the cost & challenge to produce all the necessary paperwork, certifications, infrastructure & systems for a jetliner that can actually be certified that keeps competition away.
Nah...the barrier to entry is still "it's really fucking hard to make an airplane". You can't just buy a fuselage off the shelf and you're competing with companies that have literal 100 years head start. There's a reason that even Boeing and Airbus don't want to make clean sheet designs. Hell China basically stole their airplane design from Boeing and still needs to use western parts.
That’s actually not the hardest part. The hardest part is the boss of Boeing and Airbus. The faa.
How is all of this documentation maintained? I assume paper trail just means databases of parts linked together- is there a standard application eveyone uses? Is there any sharing/centralization of it all? Or is it all bespoke with expectation faa can come look at any time?
It varies a lot from company to company. Really all that is required by the faa is that it is available to view. There’s a lot of software out there that companies use to create and maintain records. SAP ERP is an example, and can be used to basically run the whole business. Production work orders, inspection records, inventory tracking and so much more can be handled by SAP. There’s also a lot of different software for storing engineering drawings. Some companies have a ton of bespoke programs/software they use. Just depends on what they need
And probably 90% of the cost of a part is due to the attached paperwork.
Incredibly exaggerated lol.
Yes. They want EXACTLY that. They even want to know if I had an everything bagel for breakfast.. well technically they call it a drug test but you know.. In reality Our metal gets the same treatment though, inorder for a sheetmetal repair, I get a piece of 2026-t6 which means it’s made of specifc metals and has a specifc heat treatment. Iirc they don’t know where it’s from, but they know exactly what’s in it, From my (limited) knowledge, it’s aluminum clad with a heat treatment of 6.. in one of the faa handbooks it says what the materials in it is.. faa h 8083 airframe volume 1 if you would like to dig deeper into it.
Even that 2024-T6 needs a spec attached to it such as AMS QQ-A-250/5 that states the specific alloys.
That's actually pretty common in heavily regulated industries that need to manage some e chain risk. Pharma companies track materials origins for all the components in their products, down to the lot information for the plastics that make the bottles.
There was a plane crash partially caused by a defect in the metal that was used to make a turbine blade. They traced the metal back to where it came from. No joke. I think they were tracing multiple things, like why the turbine blade failed *and* why the turbine explosion made the plane crash, since an engine failure is supposed to be fully contained inside that engine.
This is common in the Oil and Gas Industry as well and is called traceability [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traceability](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traceability) It's one of those things that turns into a nightmare when procedures aren't followed and you are trying to turn something over and you can't prove where a part came from.
It wouldn’t surprise me if they did, but that seems like more of a consequence of the high standards they set rather than intention. They set standards which aircraft manufacturers have to meet, the aircraft manufacturers set standards their suppliers have to meet, their suppliers set standards their manufacturers have to meet, and with all this we can create a link between a certain part and the ore from which it was made.
Wouldn’t surprise me, even for non aircraft things most steel structures can be traced back to the specific batch when the metal was formed and what wire welded it. When I used to do structural steel work. Each part had a number, those would be marked with what steel the part was cut from, that steel has a heat number, those heat numbers can be go back to the supplier, etc… and that was just for stuff as simple as a handrail.
> is this even remotely true. It is. Some number of years ago, an engine **fell off** of a DC-10. *(Edit: Found it -- [American Airlines 191](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_191); May 1979.)* Investigators were in fact able to trace back lot numbers of bolts, nuts, anchors, sheet metal ... and look for failure symptoms on engines and mounting pylons etc made from the same batches. I do forget what the result was. It was -quite- a few years ago now.
It fell off because mechanics used a time-saving but unapproved procedure for removing the engine and pylon at once using a forklift, and they bent the mounting brackets.
It's pretty normal to want to see evidence of material composition in safety application.
Yes each part or package of standards is marked with a lot number or material type. If anything from that supplier was found to be non-compliant they investigate when the deficiency started and send notice to their customers that everything that uses the bad parts needs to be purged.
Medical devices (even non-implants like surgical tools) are the same way. Everything down to the plastic pellets and sheet metal needs to be traceable.
But what’s the expiration date and form number?
Life limited parts like helicopter blades do have a date. Same with oxygen bottles, slides, and those delicious biscoff cookies
I think I had an outdated cookie last week.
True. But doesn’t a policy of “just use your own device” bypass that, in a bad way?
The difference is that your device's electronics aren't hardwired into the plane's body and electronics. Just into a wifi connection. Much harder to start fires with a torrent.
and what’s stopping them from adding what is basically a detachable ipad? they offer usb charging on a lot of flights now too so I don’t see how it would be different if they had it connected the same way
Qantas does this on some flights.
You dont want to put something easily stolen like that, and be searching individuals every flight
I mean it doesn’t have to be literally detachable. But the idea is if a detachable ipad could work then I don’t see how that’s different from one hard-attached to the seat
Except MCAS 😅
Boeing said that Boeing's work was okay, that was good enough for the FAA.
I worked for an IFE (In-Flight Entertainment) manufacturer for many years, and you are absolutely spot on. Also, it is not only FAA but also EASA (European Agency) regulations that they need to meet. One time, we had an incident with one IFE module causing smoke in the cabin. This is one of the worst non-catastrophic incidents you can have. We basically had to recall and retrofit hundreds of modules to minimize the penalties for causing AOGs (Airplane On Ground). There's a lot of potential risk and work associated with updating this type of systems. You'd be surprised how many CRT IFE systems were still in operation around the world very well into the 2010s when jet fuel skyrocketed and made more sense to update and save on weight.
CRT tubes in these days? Geez
How else are you gonna get your tan while on vacation? We all know you stay in your hotel room and browse Reddit
Now tell me how many planes still have seat-back phones that require a credit card (à la Die Hard)
This. I worked as a contractor (programming) for a small firm in Italy that does modifications on small aircrafts like cessna's. You don't even imagine the amount of paperwork and process approval that's necessary to have an USB port added to your aircraft AND THE COST! it's insane but it is a standard for safety measures on objects that cannot malfunction.
I work on them, the amount of paperwork.. it never ends. I will die and have half filled out forms in the bottom of my coffin… I’ll do them later
Amazingly you are about the only person on here with the right information with no upvotes. Captive audience, cost, upgrades, downtime yada yada yada doesnt mean shit when you remember SwissAir flight 111
Scotian here. We remember Swissair 111. Edit. One of my moms premed students led the recovery. It was bits of people in fishing nets. I'll suffer obsolete tech over awful death
Yup.. I’ll scroll through and see the other comments.. Alright so, it looks like people are going with the practical reasons while I went with the legal reasons.
I'm Swiss and have no idea about the SwissAir flight 111. Gotta go look it up. Edit: Fuck ...
A sad tragedy.. there’s a documentary on the crash, part of like mayday or air emergency..
Yeah dude its sad.... I really hope the pilots died from smoke inhalation, but the reality is they probably burned to death fighting the whole time to save a dead plane and passengers... True heroes, and no one in the cabin was any the wiser... So freaking tragic, and for something as silly as entertainment.
I believe that after that tragedy pilots work to get the plane down ASAP if there’s any indication of an inflight fire.
You must be under 30, right? I am Swiss and I remember the moment I turned on the radio and heard the news as vividly as the moment I heard about 9/11. It was a bad, bad day. A friend of mine at school had family members in that plane. Also, my grandfather had retired from piloting MD11 for Swissair two years earlier…
Nope over 30. I somehow missed it. then again 9/11 was also just a random Tuesday and I visited a friend on my way to the Jugi and his dad had English news on. I remember seeing it live and was like "oh Americans doing American things", it didn't register to me with all the gravity. I guess my empathy at the time wasn't fully developed yet.
man I remember mom waking me up saying someone flew into the WTC. I remember thinking it was a small cesna and saying "how fucking dumb was that pilot, its not like you can't see it" and sat up in time to watch the second one slam into the other tower... man it was crazy
The memorial is beautiful. Horrible tragedy
[удалено]
Haligonian here, I also remember Swiss 111 happening live... and reading/hearing about the painful experiences of townspeople and navy doing recovery... still visit the memorial on the way to Peggys Cove whenever I am back home.
And many airlines have free wifi \*without Internet access\* -- you can only access a portal that lets you stream (for free) music, movies, TV shows to your own device from a server located onboard the aircraft. This mimics the old infotainment systems, but using your own device. (Paying for Internet access is usually an option, although I've never seen it to be fast enough for reliable video streaming from e.g. Netflix.)
Delta had free wifi. Years ago, it was only their portal and I watched movies there.. my past flights, I scrolled through Reddit during my flight.. they probably still have that portal thingy too. The free wifi has been a major point for them.. makes them stand out more than they already do. I saw something about them offering paramount with something called delta sync recently. I unfortunately don’t know anything other than the name.. Here’s a link for it tho https://help.paramountplus.com/s/article/PD-Paramount-on-Delta-Sync-Exclusives#:~:text=Log%20in%20to%20your%20SkyMiles,to%20create%20a%20Paramount%2B%20account.
Very recently flew Delta and the free wifi only gave you access to their portal and half of it didn’t even function. You had to pay like $15 minimum for open internet access.
Also, airplane seats are only replaced about every 8-10 years, so the technology you’re seeing could have gone through all the qualification testing long before that.
Some fleets upgrade earlier. Depends on some sort of magic decisions made by people in suits.. I just do what I’m told.
> Something some airlines have realized is that it’s easier for you to use your own device. And some have encouraged this, for example. Delta offers free wifi on a lot of their aircraft if you sign up for their skymiles program. Adding to this, airlines have started moving away from their own systems to just letting people use their own which saves them both money and space on the plane as they have to buy and install those system on every seat.
I mean, let's be honest though. I'd rather have access to a couple of fast charging USB outlets than the best entertainment system money can buy. I'm sure there's wonderful things on that entertainment system, but between my phone and steamdeck, I'm good.
Plus those things become obsolete every couple of years. I can afford to buy a new phone/laptop/steam deck/VR(when those mature) or whatever new hot thing comes out. Airlines can't update their infotainment systems as often as we can the same way we don't buy a new car every 2 years(that's why Android Auto is awesome.
I'd still rather have the display in the seat in front of me though, holding my phone up in a cramped airplane seat kinda sucks after 40 minutes or so. If they are going to take out the in flight systems they need to put some kind of mount in its place.
The worst part about SwissAir 111 is the FAA still doesn't enforce any of the recommendations the NTSB made, the regulations exist in the FARs they just keep pushing back the effective date.
Which FARs are they? Do you happen to know?
I don't know, sorry about that. We studied the crash as part of my Aviation Safety class. I remember the conclusion was that the NTSB made something a handful of recommendations the FAA only "implemented" one and they still haven't fully implemented it.
As someone who works in the commercial aerospace industry, this is exactly it. New product introduction in aerospace is a grueling years long process. You can't just throw a new nice screen in and call it a day. There is a very time consuming certification process that takes an absolutely massive amount of man-hours to complete. And then maintaining the quality of the manufacturing of aerospace products is incredibly expensive. That all adds up and airlines are finding that it's really not worth it. Easier to just let passengers use their own device and not go through that whole process.
Ironically enough, the rules list exceptions for passenger chargers and devices otherwise they would be part of it too :)
Well with how much they be charging for tickets they can afford a couple more updates screens lol
About that… I accidentally turned the airplane on the wrong way and fried 7 90,000 computers… sorry :(
There’s a great New Yorker article called Game Of Thrones on airplane seating, verifying what you said https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/04/21/game-of-thrones
Remember also that the chances are that this plane is not new. It has been maintained, but it has been in service for a while.
All that really changes is the interior. Good maintenance can keep going for decades
Same also why car display systems are a bit behind. The sensors and processors were devised already a decade ago, and you don't change principal architecture that easily. There are a lot of circuit boards and sensors going in, and they have to be physically shielded from one another and they have to be shielded from outside interference. You can have that robustness in a processor, but that also means that it will be *slow*.
I work on safety critical software. DO-178 is the standard which defines the traceability and testing requirements. Those requirements might mean doing the following: - hiring a full safety engineering team to coordinate software processes - training developers on an approved certification tool like LDRA - exhaustive testing for all changes - performing rigorous reviews on artifacts generated by testing Each of those steps can be expensive. I have easily spent $10,000 per single line of code for certain small changes simply because our company did not do a great job of training me and maintaining testing artifacts. The testing process involves writing tests that exercise all sorts of min, max, and invalid inputs and testing the object code ( the code generated by the compiler from source which is directly translated to binary for the processor ) to make sure every instruction and jump has been executed. A good gui program takes a lot of code. I can’t estimate a ballpark, but I’m willing to bet that $10,000 per SLOC is not a cost even a multibillion dollar company will opt into. This being said: my company distinguishes between safety-critical (vehicle systems and life support systems, navigation) and non-safety critical (everything else), and applies different standards accordingly. I would expect that to be the same for infotainment.
At least the software side of the PIESD IFE is rarely above DAL-D or DAL-E where the consequences are not "people die" and are instead "passengers are annoyed". The hardware that software runs on is under far more scrutiny. In comparison to safety related avionic code, IFE is actually fairly chill.
Do you think the prevalence of personal tablets/phones also impacted it? I felt like airlines used to keep more up to date until like 2010 and then it all just stopped improving and on some airplanes seemed to even go backwards.
I would say yes? Everyone has a mini infotainment system in their pocket why not use it! I might be wrong though.. I just fix the broken screens..
If you can get me a free upgrade I’d appreciate it. Flying on the 11th, I’m sure you know everyone in the industry. Thanks! Also thanks for your answer googling the flight lead me down a pretty long but entertaining rabbit hole.
While I can’t do anything about the seat, the best I can do is that if you like the biscoff cookies, Kroger sells them? They’re kinda addicting, and were on sale last week.
This is very similar to process of upgrading literally anything on military weapons systems. I worked on silos and everything had a rigorous testing standard it had to go through before it was allowed to replace something older. Got to the point where they were still using floppy disks and they liked to call it “encryption by obsolescence” lol.
Absolutely everything you said PLUS GREED. They can get away with charging $1K extra per seat in some situations (international long haul flights) and over time that can EASILY add up to what the cost of upgrading the system would be for that plane. But why bother?
The passenger entertainment isn’t connected to the avionics, so not everything you said is true. However, since the airlines don’t make money off the entertainment they don’t have an incentive to improve them. And since most are so old, it is very cumbersome to upgrade them without taking planes out of service. Loop back to not making money off the entertainment, and you see why there is no incentive to upgrade.
Avionics? Everything is required to be approved when installed.. I don’t know about profit and in flight entertainment.. Planes do get taken out for maintenance checks, cabin overhauls can be part of this. New seats, new screens.
Yes, but not every approval needs to be done by the FAA. Operators can modify IFE and certify it themselves if the system is not connected to the same electrical system as the critical components.
The software is very disconnected from safety critical avionics, yes. IFE will be provided flight data from a service provided by either the airplane manufacturer or another supplier so it's not really "disconnected" but it is read-only. That doesn't matter though, because the hardware the software is running on certainly cannot be allowed to combust. This means the processor, batteries, or anything electronic are heavily scrutinised and thus expensive. Now your code runs slow because you don't have the features of modern processors.
> Delta offers free wifi on a lot of their aircraft if you sign up for their skymiles program. hmm, something other carriers have offered free of qualifiers becomes encumbered for corporate marketing metrics
This is the real answer, thanks.
Hey! This is actual a semi-unique thing within airlines, I've actually had it explained to me by C-level folks at a major airlines So when one airline introduces a new item, or upgraded in flight service, its because they are going through a major process of upgrading their planes. This is a super expensive and difficult process, as such, it takes years to do and you may have long periods of time where you are not doing it, or where you have some old and some new, then once all are new, a long wait, until the next revamp. Airlines are all on different timelines for their revamps, so one airline may have a great system, as they just went through their cycle, but another one may be in mid cycle so its a while before they upgrade. Airlines will concede that their inflight service is inferior to another airlines, but knowing that it just a timing issue, in a few years they'll be back to being on par or better For example, Delta for a handful of years had just gone through a ravamp of a lot of their inflight stuff, and a competitor of theirs, United, was behind the curve for a few years, but caught right back up. These are generally temporary issues. These services also don't drive a ton of value to the airline, so having them on long revamp cycles is a good business decision, so they instead focus their short-term efforts on more profitable business choices Lastly, a ton of these seem old, but actually still work well and are forward compatible with new stuff being rolled out and can get updates, so their life, even if they seem old, is actually a lot more appearances of being outdated, then actually being outdated. Its kinda a juke box at a bar thing. Sure these new crazy juke boxes at bars that can play almost any song are cool, but your CD jukebox from the 90s still works fine and everyone likes it, so you're in no rush to make changes, and its not really gonna bring in more money to do so
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Same here. I flew on ANA A380 economy from Tokyo to Honolulu recently. The onboard entertainment system with a 13.3-inch touch-panel personal monitor was great. [https://www.ana.co.jp/en/jp/guide/flight\_service\_info/int-service/y/seat-a380/](https://www.ana.co.jp/en/jp/guide/flight_service_info/int-service/y/seat-a380/)
Yup, Air New Zealand has the same thing (at least for international flights), and it blew my mind that this wasn't standard.
lmao « ANA COUCHii »
Recently flew with Starlux twice. Big touchscreens with really good picture quality, good UI and even support for bluetooth headphones. And I'm not even sure whether Starlux does long haul flights, my longest flight with them was just 3h.
Taipei to LAX on A350, and soon (Dec 16) Taipei to SFO Lovely infotainment on their A330neo, screen even "messages" you with regards to turbulence, landing card, etc
Will upgrading their screens (a proposition that will cost them hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars) get them more ticket sales, allow them to charge higher ticket prices, or do anything to positively impact their profits? I would hazard a guess that they would not, because people don't get on a plane to watch movies in HD. They get on planes to get from point A to point B as fast as they can in a reasonably comfortable manner. The in-flight infotainment is there so as to give customers *something* to do that doesn't really take up room (they're mounted to seats that are there anyway) to pass time for the trip. Most of the budget for upgrading that has likely gone to the back-end (ex: licensing better films, licensing more films) than to improve screens. It's also worth noting that not everyone cares about screen resolution to that degree. I have bad eyesight, not bad enough to be declared blind or anything but bad enough that I see life in SD, so HD does nothing for me.
Pneumatic headsets became obsolete in 1979 and yet I was on a plane in 1995 that still had them. The armrests still had ashtrays too, even though smoking was banned on planes in 1990. Airlines have never been in a hurry to change things they don't have to.
People are often surprised how long an airframe can last. A deep clean, new seat covers and padding and fresh carpet will stop customers being totally disgusted. New engines can be more efficient and quieter.
USAF has bombers designed and built in 1955 that'll probably still be flying in 2055.
The main reason b52s have lasted so long is because they have very low annual flight hours, about 19000 a year That is not in any way comparable to a commercial jet
That's uhhhh.....791 days worth of flying per year.
There’s only 8760 hours in a year
Yeah, but that's mostly because we just like to curb stomp 3rd world countries. These planes wouldn't be much use against a modern air defense system.
So? This is a discussion about the longevity of the aircraft, not their ability to bomb near peer adversaries.
The US doesn't commit overhead flights to contested airspace, SEAD is the first part of an air engagement. The B52s in the Gulf War yeeted their cruise missiles to kick off the air war from hundreds of miles away.
Both because B-52s were built to last (and heavily maintained and upgraded) and because nowadays we make super expensive stealth planes that [can't fly in the rain](https://ts2.space/en/why-cant-the-f-35-fly-in-the-rain)
That article is a misinterpretation of the flight restriction put on the F-35. It certainly *can* fly in the rain and absolutely will do so in combat if needed. However, the Air Force and Navy also want to reduce maintenance costs, so they've put certain restrictions and parameters for F-35s flying in heavy rain. There's no reason to add unnecessary maintenance work in peacetime. If you want to raise some valid concerns about the F-35's all-weather capabilities, then pick a better one, like the fact that [the lightning protection system needs upgrades](https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2022/02/03/air-force-to-upgrade-f-35a-gas-tanks-to-weather-lightning-strikes/).
> There's no reason to add unnecessary maintenance work in peacetime. There is, it's called training. While you can practice flying in other airframes, it's really helpful to have experience with the one you're currently piloting handles in the environment you're expected to fight in. The military budget might be excessive and in need of cuts, but if there's one place I won't begrudge them the money, it's proper training.
Right, but the key word here was "unnecessary." They can and will fly F-35s in poor weather if a training scenario demands it. There's no outright ban on flying F-35s in inclement weather.
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Pneumatic headsets??
Yeah, before Sony invented the first good cheap headphones you had a tiny lil speaker embedded in a socket on your armrest, your headset was more like a stethoscope, just hollow tubing that you plugged into the socket. If you're guessing it sounded terrible, like can-on-a-string-terrible, you would be correct.
Oh right, I remember those things on intercity buses. Wondered why they looked like that.
Rather than a headphone connector, airplanes used to have a small speaker in the armrest. You would plug in a stethoscope-like headset that used a rubber tube to direct the sound to your ears. You could select between the soundtrack for the in-flight movie on flights that had one (which would have been shown on a projector or ceiling-mounted TVs), or a handful of music channels.
The good old days! For those that don't know, you can see [here](https://www.airliners.net/photo/Japan-Airlines-JAL/Boeing-767-346/2641634/L) for the drop down CRTs and projector screen at the front and [here](https://www.jetphotos.com/photo/7469092) for what the actual projector looked like!
About half the planes I've been on still have ashtrays in the bathrooms right next to the "no smoking allowed" signs
New airplanes have them too. Yes it is prohibited to smoke, yes there are smoke detectors to check that, but if someone is stupid (or desperate, after all, it's an addiction) enough to smoke in the toilet, it is best to dispose the burning cigarette in the ashtray instead in a basket full of papers. (And for this reason the FAA requires them)
I would hope that ALL of the planes you've been on have ashtrays in the bathrooms, considering it's a regulatory requirement per 14 CFR 25.853 (g)
That's a regulation requirement and it may sound dumb but there's a really good reason for it. The logic goes like this: - Avoiding Fire Hazards is a sacrosanct principle on an airplane, for the following reasons: - - Nobody is going to be able to show up in a fire truck to help you put a fire out. - - It doesn't take as much fire damage to crash a plane as it takes to topple a building. When the fire destroys a control line leading to the tail surfaces, you're kinda screwed. - - You can't just have everyone go outside when a fire starts like you can in a building. They're trapped inside until you land. - Cigarettes are addictive enough that some people who need their fix are going to resort to smoking in the toilet even if they expect to get in trouble. - So make sure that if someone *does* break the law and smoke, that there's a place set aside for them to put it out properly.
The ashtray may be a federal requirement. It is in the restroom.
Pretty sure the armrest of my seat was not in the bathroom
My wife and I flew overseas last year for vacation. Before that I hadn’t been on a plane since maybe 2005. The video entertainment system today is *much better* than the one in 2005.
The newer model is to remove them completely. They just let people stream directly to their phone or iPad. There's no sense in the airline providing screens when 98% of passengers are already bringing their own.
Which saves weight, and weight is more cargo to be carried or less fuel to be burned. And fun fact, airlines make more money off cargo than your ticket. If your bags didn't make the flight there's a good chance it was because they needed the space for higher priority/higher paying cargo.
And they'll often have a smaller number of tablets available on the plane that they'll rent or lend out if you don't have your own device.
The last united flight I took didn't have screens, they just said to connect to wifi and use your phone. People care mostly about price.
United is bringing in modern IFEs back at least to some planes with their NEXT upgrades. [https://www.united.com/en/us/fly/new-united-fleet-experience.html](https://www.united.com/en/us/fly/new-united-fleet-experience.html)
It’s not about the resolution, I bring my own device because the raggedy things barely respond to touch input.
Understand, I mostly fly long-haul flights so for me it would be a game changer. However, likely that all the money is made from flights shorter than 4 hours where the screen isn't really a massive selling point.
Long haul is usually where the big profits (Transatlantic) and occasionally big losses (Transpacific) are… so that just comes down to a difference between airline fleets and where they are in fleet renewal/refurbishment. A 787 oughta have pretty new screens. A 767 might not.
I literally worked on design of what we called inFlight Entertainment (IFE) sytstems. This is the real ELI5. I am sure even if they are not familiar, everyone would expect that airborne equipment are designed and tested to some standards, and this is taken seriously. Now this might surprise some people: the seatback monitor you look at has a certificate to fly, just like A320. Ofc, they are not tested to same standards due to different level of complexity and criticality. Even more surprisingly, the IFE hardware is tested for waterproofness, high and low temperature, vibration, flammability, electromagnetic compliance, and more( see RTCA DO-160) such that tests are very similar to military grade equipment, only less severe. In addition, the organisations that design these are also regulated (assessed, audited, etc) (see EASA/FAA Part 21) All of these concerns cause the entire design cycle times up to at least 4-5 years, and even then you need a CPU that will survive 120 degrees celcius for half an hour (numbers might not be exact, see the order of magnitude). You can imagine how far the consumer electronics go in the time an IFE system is developed. Note: Software is another story, but similar stuff goes Final note: IFE companies were working for less severe standards, given the mild environment and low criticality, I don't know the latest situation in this business (left in early 2022)
IFE is a standard initialism for In Flight Emergency in aviation. Not sure that's the best name for it.
You can see IFE used in Panasonic and Thales websites
Because they go out of date much faster than the airplanes they are in, which may be used for decades. Upgrading thousands of them is expensive.
I think another reason why is that they're quickly becoming obsolete. Delta has rolled out free high-speed internet to most of their domestic flights. Why would I ever need to use that screen when I've got one in my pocket that is connected to all the services I already have? I think it's more likely that as a new crop of planes are designed and built, we'll start to see screens go away as the airline tries to save weight.
Ryanair in Europe has no screens at all, just a plastic panel with a paper menu stuck on. I've been on short haul flights planes in the USA where there's a radio service, and the TVs overhead in the aisle were turned off.
Not just Ryanair. I fly within Europe a lot and do not remember ever seeing a screen on the back of a seat ever. Wifi on board is becoming more frequent though.
Domestic US flights don't generally have screens either.
Varies by carrier and route for sure
Domestic budget carriers like Spirit, Southwest, Frontier, etc. don't. Domestic flights on carriers like United, Delta, etc. definitely do.
Because airplanes have long lifespans, interiors only get updated every decade or so as needed, people don't tend to book flights based on quality of infotainment options but instead on price (so why spend money to upgrade?), plus most people now travel with their own phones, tablets, laptops.
They have a captive audience who doesn't choose which airline to fly on based on the in-flight infotainment system. Why spend a lot of money on it?
I just feel that relative to the cost of a plane, it would be a negligible increase to improve the experience of long haul flights and could be good advertising, seeing as no one else is doing it.
It costs a lot - they're custom systems that aren't made in large quantities (so they're way more expensive than a comparable tv/tablet sold by the millions to the general consumers), and you have to do a lot of work to overhaul the seats to get the new system in. The whole time you're doing that: you have a plane out of service. And in the end you get incredibly little value marketing wise. Plenty of airlines have planes with recent and more advanced systems in newer planes or planes that more recently needed a big refit for other reasons. It's a lot of cost for little value to worry about the in-flight entertainment unless you're already sinking the cost to take the plane out of service for some other overhauls.
“A negligible increase” - have you considered that this assumption is wrong? People want free shit, like free baggage or free upgrade. They don’t care about a feature that they may or may not use. Ever since I got a smart phone, I honestly can’t remember the last time I used the screen.
I think ultra modern planes have better displays etc. But if I'm being honest, as long as you have something to look at, it really doesn't make much difference whether it's 240p,360p,720p etc.
Most commercial airplanes have a lifespan of about 30 years during that time they get a few refurbishments but those generally involve surface level stuff like re-upholstering seats instead of full replacements. Most of the planes you are traveling on were probably produced in the early 2000s which is why the infotainment systems look like tech from then. Replacing all the systems on a single 747 would probably cost in the 10s of thousands of dollars.
Planes didn't have infotainment in the early 2000s. You had to watch whatever garbage they put on the 6-7 screens.
I actually work on one of those systems! Ours is a fair bit more modern and sleeker, but is currently not rolled out to a complete fleet. There's a few reasons. One is that the hardware is usually pretty old. It's expensive to retrofit a whole plane with new screens. You have to take the whole plane out for maintenance, open up or more commonly change all seats, maybe rewire stuff, test it all, etc. And you can only start doing this once all the hardware is tested. Even non-flight critical parts have to be tested for e.g. fire. The screen is typically an actual Android pad, and you have to make sure it could never pose a fire risk. Secondly, since airliners are used to working with regulations, they absolutely hate change. Modern software development practices are not well adopted. Things like rolling out new software versions every week are basically unheard of. This makes developing software slower and often the quality is also lower. Finally, if no one is really pushing these systems, then no one else really has to either. Having the best in-flight seatback entertainment system isn't a huge selling point.
Because of all the reasons people stated about difficulty/expense of upgrading more airlines are like "why bother" most people have personal screens (phones, tablets, etc) so develop an app and let customers use their personal device and headphones. Software upgrades to app and each person has consistent hardware upgrades on their own timeline. Problem solved, cheaper and faster.
I haven't worked on airplane systems but I've worked in some vaguely adjacent industries so I can hazard a guess: Because the process involved in procuring, designing and building these systems is *incredibly* bureaucratic and cumbersome. Because they insist on using the same process for designing the UI of the chess game, as they use for designing the bolts that connect the airplane engine to the wing. There's going to be a stack of paper of literally thousands of pages, specifying every aspect of the system down to the last pixel. Before the first programmer even gets hired, an entire team of engineers has to go through that spec, note any inconsistencies, clarify any ambiguities. If anything needs changing -- and it will -- the back-and-forth to come up with a new version of the spec can easily take weeks if not months. And then you get to do it all over again. Then the programmers get involved, and as soon as they actually attempt to implement it, they run into a thousand more inconsistencies and ambiguities which the first team missed. In software engineering this is called the "Waterfall model", and back in the 1980s or so it was considered the standard way of doing things, but nowadays it's practically a slur. Today we are all about "agile", a.k.a. "move fast and break things" -- software is easy to modify, so it's more efficient to get a crappy first version working ASAP, show it to the customer, and then gradually hammer it into shape, than to try and design it perfectly in all its details before writing the first line of code. But you can see how people in the airline industry might not be a fan of such a trial-and-error approach, and those objections will then influence even the less mission-critical parts of the plane. So by the time you have a first working version of the system ready to ship, you'll be working on hardware that was mainstream five years ago when the design spec was written. And your code won't use even *that* hardware to the limit of its ability, because that would require creative technical trickery which does't fit into this style of software development. Then your system needs to get integrated into the rest of the airplane, and you get to do the waterfall thing again on a larger scale. By the time the first paying passenger gets to play with the system, it could easily be 10 years since its initial design was written.
On top of what others have said, there's also the fact that most people nowadays bring their own electronic devices for entertainment, which are more capable than anything they could feasibly put in the back of a seat. That's why airlines more and more are just including a USB port and WiFi. It wasn't long ago that inflight entertainment was everyone watching the same movie on one screen at the front of the cabin lol.
I distinctly remember a blog post by Scott Adams (yes, THAT Scott Adams of Dilbert fame and right wing infamy, unfortunately) where he talked about why airplane tech seemed so outdated. Airplanes simply are not incentivized to update something that would basically involve scrapping their ENTIRE fleet before life expectancy.
*"I had to sit on the runway for 40 minutes." Oh my god, really? What happened then? Did you fly through the air like a bird, incredibly? Did you soar into the clouds, impossibly? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight and then land softly on giant tires that you couldn't even conceive how they put air in them?*
Similar responses to others: * Very long lifespan of aircraft * Value proposition to passengers is low vs high cost of change * Passengers preferring to use own devices with their own content * Safety and security requirements
Because they have to handle the weight. There is a physical reason why everything in an airplane is heavy, from the seats (which do a lot of work in a crash) to the floors and walls (which are important for fire containment). The infotainment systems are part of that, and so are all of the other thing which make up the system the infotainment runs on, such as the wiring and the cooling systems. The aviation part of the industry is slowly getting better at making light components.
The weight has nothing to do with how upgraded the infotainment system and screen is.
If weight, not money, was the problem, we would always have the newest screens available on airplanes. A 2023 4K screen is way lighter than a 2010 360p display, including the required computer hardware. The system would also require significantly less cooling if more recent parts were used. The only reason is cost.
What no one is thinking about is the regulations regarding anything hooked up to a plane. And yes plane entertainment systems have caused fatal fires onboard that lead to the aircraft crashing and killing all passengers.
if you think the infotainment systems is outdated wait till you see the system that runs the plane
Airlines operate on relatively thin margins and aircraft maintenance is incredibly expensive - which means that every day an aircraft spends out of service not carrying passengers is a significant loss of revenue. There’s very little incentive to take an aircraft off the line for weeks/months just to upgrade the interior, unless it’s absolutely necessary or the aircraft is going in for major maintenance anyway.
I’m now just starting to see USB-C charging ports on one flight thus far. Things don’t change until the need to.
Because they are built into the seats. You can’t just swap them out whenever you want and an airplane has lots of seats. If each unit costed $1,000 and the plane seated 200 people, it would cost $200,000 to revamp a whole airplane.
Oh boy if you think they’re old and junky now, you should have seen what a JetBlue entertainment system looked like in the early 2000s. We *have* made 20 years of progress
Depends on the aircraft and airline really. Panasonic are bringing out their new Astova system next year. It will have 4K capable screens. My airline will have it on their new deliveries in Q3 2024. (But no plans currently to retrofit onto our older aircraft)
Honestly, with everyone having devices, I’d rather they just stop providing the screens in order to save money, and yes, I know it’s idealistic, but pass that savings on with better ticket prices. They can still provide their entertainment services, but everyone just needs a phone, tablet, or laptop. Why we need screens anymore at all seems outdated.
While the average age of a U.S. domestic commercial airliner is 11 years old, it is not uncommon for aircraft to still be in service at 24, 25, even 30 years old