Slacy’s Blog

We recently took a cross-country trip on Virgin America. The flights were on-time, the crew was nice, the purple lights were trendy and fun, and the food was great. But, there were a lot of aspects that I was extremely disappointed with:

1. Legroom. I’m 6′4″, and there wasn’t enough legroom. I mean, I was totally crushed by the seat in front of me and had no where to go, even if fully reclined. I don’t really think that 6′4″ is that far above the mean for American males, is it? I haven’t been on a plane with that little space ever. Even the “less legroom” section of JetBlue is more comfortable than Virgin America.
2. Shoulder room entering the plane. There’s a plexiglass barrier thats not as wide as my shoulders are. I had to squeeze through, carrying a backpack and baby in a carseat. Why is this plastic barrier in my way?! Let me enter the plane in peace!
3. Arm rests go up, but not all the way. What is the point of an armrest that goes up, if it doesn’t get out of your way? It would only tilt up to about a 45 degree angle, and thats it. This was absolutely no help when getting settled in our seats with 3 carry-on bags, a baby, a carseat, 2 winter jackets, and a boppy.
4. VA Red’s TV quality. Even the slightest amount of turbulence, or the plane turning, would make the video get all pixelated and break up. It would then take 5+ minutes for the signal to return to normal. All the while, a DishNetwork dialog box would be onscreen saying things like “Now downloading program guide information”. Well, screw the program guide, since I can’t even browse it at all
5. VA Red’s Audio quality. You would think that on a plane thats less than 4 months old (VA’s first flight was on 8/8/07), that they wouldn’t have broken 1/8″ audio jacks on every single seat. Its become the norm for airlines to have broken audio jacks, but I was really surprised at this one. Then, when you do actually get the audio so that you can hear it, it sounds like crap. Actually, what it sounds like is a mono mp3 encoding at about 32kbps. In other words, crap. (Why did they bother with such poor encoding and such a nice media system?)
6. VA Red’s channel selection. There were several channels that never displayed anything other than a DishNetwork dialog box saying “You’re eligible for a free upgrade. Press Enter now.” Um, do I care?
7. VA Red’s UI in general. Looks like Linux, unfortunately. Unpolished, and way too rough around the edges.
8. VA Red’s mapping interface. Why doesn’t the image of the plane update in realtime? Seems like the plane moves half way across the screen every 5 minutes or so. The inclusion of Google Maps images was great, but the lack of updates was horrible.
9. VA Red’s suggestions/feedback system was broken. I got all the way to typing in a bunch of comments, only to have the ’submit’ button fail to work. Ugh.
10. $8 for a movie! And we have to pay twice if we both want to watch it? Seriously, this is going a bit far. $16 for 2 people to watch a movie with crappy audio on an 8″ screen is just too much!
11. “This feature is unimplemented.” Then why do you have the menu item for it? GRRRR! Don’t tempt me with reading e-mail and browsing the web when its just a pipe dream!

So, a huge thumbs down to VA Red, and a huge thumbs down to legroom, so a huge thumbs down to Virgin America.

Sorry guys, you’re no where even close to being as good as JetBlue.

Tags: airline, legroom, sucks, va red, vared, virgin america

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 27th, 2007 at 5:14 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.