This report is filed from the JFK to SFO flight on Virgin America’s WiFi enabled jet. We thought we’d try out “air-fi” to see how it worked. First impressions are great – there’s simple upload and download of email, easy access to the web. As you do use it you get to notice some of issues from the slower connections which you’d probably expect – YouTube videos buffer for a long while, for example. There’s also some trickery going on behind the scenes to manage data volume – I’m writing this from PSFK’s web-based publishing platform not from my desk-top [...]
Read more...June 10, 2009
February 23, 2009
United Airlines & The ‘Electrocution’ Of Passengers
When a survey of PSFK readers I conducted said that 75% of you think that a ‘helpful’ inflight staff is an attribute of a great airline – why, in our experience, do airlines still seem to fail to provide the simplest of services? In this opinion piece I try to theorize about airlines’ group-hate of passengers and the strategic problem fueling it.
A particularly painful flight(s) I took recently (partly documented on Facebook here and here) on United Airlines reminded me of the controversial experiment by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram in 1961. The Milgram experiment involved ‘teachers’ who would give [...]




