The Bugs in Virgin America’s New High-Tech Flights

By Brad Stone

Tags: Virgin America

There are a few kinks to work out of the vaunted in-flight entertainment system of Virgin America, the low-cost domestic airline that launched to great acclaim last month.

In-flight entertainment screens in the main cabin of a Virgin America Airbus A320. (Photo: Jonathan Fickies/Bloomberg News)

Touch screens are tucked into the back of each seat, and remote controls with keyboards are hidden in each armrest. The system, called RED, lets passengers watch live TV, listen to music, play games, order and pay for movies with a swipe of the credit card and invite other passengers into online chat-rooms.

If only it worked consistently.

I took Virgin America to and from New York City last week, and on both trips there were significant problems with the system. On the fight to New York, my screen froze and did not awake for an hour, until I complained to a flight attendant and she disappeared to reset my screen.

On the return flight, my screen was fine, but many others on the plane were beset with problems.

My seat-mate happened to be an employee of Virgin America from Washington’s Dulles airport, who was flying to Virgin’s San Francisco headquarters for training. At first, her keyboard did not work—to her great displeasure, since she wanted to text message other colleagues on the flight.

She asked the flight attendant to reset her terminal, but that actually made the problem worse. Every 10 seconds for the last four hours of the flight, a small graphical box popped up on her screen that unhelpfully said: “Fork failed: error 12. Can not allocate memory.”

The header on the message declared, “Airplay Error” – which in my opinion is a little too close to “Airplane Error.”

My seat-mate was disappointed. “I had high expectations. This was the excitement of the flight,” she told me as she tapped on the error message, every 10 seconds, to try to make it disappear.

Our fight attendant, Jessica, said there were quite a few problems with the system in general, and that “Today was not a good day.”

Next year, Virgin America says, the airplanes will offer in-flight broadband Internet access. My advice: keep those hopes at a low altitude.

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