At 9:15AM last Thursday, my plane lifted off and I began my race against the sun to the west coast. Back when I was planning the trip to Napa and booking the plane tickets, Virgin America popped up as a very competitive alternative to the normal carriers. I’m generally impressed by products carrying the Virgin brand (the Cola notwithstanding) and the Virgin American experience is no surprise.
- Style. As soon I walked onto the plane, I saw that this isn’t a traditional airline. The plane has violet lighting across the roof and magenta lighting along the sides of the plane. The background music is low key and relaxing. The initial impression for me was that of a Soho lounge, and reminded me of the Virgin Atlantic flight I took about two years ago. The employees complete the overall look of Look more like Manhattan or LA bar staff than flight attendants.
- Laptop friendly. The cabin seating has tech friendly features that are not even available in their competitor’s first class seats. There are USB and network jacks for every single seat, and two household plugs for every set of three seats. I did not have a network cable on me, so I did not have a chance to use the Internet, but the stewardess assured me that it is there and working. Network cables are cheap enough, so they should begin carrying them for customers that need them, just like the cheap headphones that they hand out before the flight. There appears to be wifi on board, but it is not for public consumption. The SSID is hidden, and the network is locked with a password. I am planning to pick up a network cable at some point before I fly back so that I can test out the Internet access.
- Seats. All of the seats in Virgin are leather and comfortable as far as airplane seats go. I am not a tall guy, and I feel that there is more legroom. Instead of the 1970s style metal armrests that have the ash tray in them that you can’t use, these contain a remote control / thumb keyboard / game controller to work the entertainment system.
- In Flight Entertainment. This is very promising and overall is a positive, but I was a little disappointed with the implementation of this system. First, the positives: the seat accepts a standard headphone jack so you can use your favorite headphones without an adapter, you can watch TV and movies, listen to the radio as well as a quite extensive number of songs, and play games. However, I found that these features are ruined by the sluggish and buggy UI. I couldn’t use the remote to navigate all of the screens, and I found that using the touch screen to navigate was very awkward and slow. I did enjoy playing the original Doom, even though the framerate was quite choppy and the controls were sluggish. When quitting a game, my screen crashed on me and had to be reset by the stewardess. I had heard promises of a wide selection of video podcasts, but on my flight, all of them were several weeks old. I was hoping that the Totally Rad Show from Revision 3 was going to be on the flight because I’ve been meaning to see it for a while, but it wasn’t in my seat selection.
The one minor downside is that you can buy a wide variety of food on the flight, but there were no free snacks on my cross country flight (not even pretzels or peanuts), but you do get the standard soda, coffee, water for free. You only get one checked bag included in your ticket, and any additional bags are extra. I don’t see these as a major problems since all of the other airlines are moving down this road as well. Overall, when I balance the positives and negatives, I had an overall great experience and would definately fly with Virgin again.
The only other negative was that the woman behind me kicked my seat almost all flight. Now we just need some way to make sure that jerks aren’t allowed on the plane.