My recent Virgin America flight was refreshing.  The high-tech amenities -  electrical plugs, USB and Ethernet hookups, and wifi network (internet coming soon) – are awesome.  Combine those with the airplane’s psychedelic lighting, the hilarious cartoon safety video, and a young and attractive flight crew, and you’ve got a one of a kind flying experience.

The seatback video screens were especially cool, providing easy ordering of Food, Drink, Movies, and TV — all with the swipe of a credit card!  One function in particular caught my interest: chat rooms

Yes, chat rooms. You can now chat with other passengers on your flight! Please tell me that Virgin has adopted a 20% free time policy (a la google) and this is some engineer’s half-baked idea.

Quick Statistics Question: What’s the probability that two or more of the 150 passengers onboard are going to:
a) Want to chat online with other passengers. (the keyboard is a mini handset thing and don’t most people hate talking to strangers on flights?)
b) Log into the chat system at the same time?

Answer: Pretty slim.

Indeed, the chat room remained empty the entire flight.  In addition to the main chatroom, there are TV channel specific rooms.  For example, you can watch CNN on half the screen, and chat about it on the other half.  The further segmentation achieved by having a chatroom for each channel basically guarantees that no two passengers will ever stumble into the same chat room.

I can’t help but wonder if first class got their own exclusive chat room, with rich text formatting and emoticons enabled.

The only way this chat system would work is if a group of friends traveling together prearranges to use the system.  On a side note, a friend and I actually set up a Bonjour wireless network on a trip home from Taiwan last summer, and we used iChat to hold a midair video conference and chat session — it was really fun.

What other social media ideas are they planning?  Perhaps an on-board social networking site?  “Hey 23A, Remember that time our plane took off?!  That was awesome – lets share our memories and photos!”  Or a LAN game of Quake?  “8C, I totally fragged you.”  Or a polling app?  “Should the crying baby in 14F be thrown overboard?  Yes/No/Maybe.”  Maybe a dating app a la AirTroductions.com or FlyBuds.com? “Seat 19B SWM ISO BBW 40DD: Hey 9F, lets take the virgin out of virgin airlines.  Meet in the bathroom in five?” How about a Trivia Game pitting the bourgeoisie in first class against the economy class proletariat?

The possibilities are endless!  But seriously, I don’t mean to discourage or make fun of Virgin Airlines.  I genuinely hope they continue to innovate and experiment with on board technologies and look forward to seeing their progress on my next flight.

One other small complaint about the system.  Virgin, if you’re going to install touchscreens in the backs of seats, please crank up the touch sensitivity to make sure it’s a touch-screen and not a press-screen.  My seat rocked every time the woman behind me jammed her finger into it.  Unfortunately, she was playing scrabble or something requiring lots of screen manipulation.  What’s the word score for A-N-N-O-Y-I-N-G?

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