United Airlines is making passengers on a 13-hour flight from Tokyo to Washington Dulles endure a flight experience from around four decades ago: No seatback screens, no in-flight Wi-Fi, and no in-seat chargers.
It’s not like this is some sort of retro-inspired experience that passengers signed up for. Rather, the 27-year-old Boeing 777-200 being used for this flight suffered a technical problem before departure, which couldn’t be fixed in Tokyo.
“They just made an announcement – no IFE, no WiFi, and no in-seat power!” wrote a passenger on United flight UA-804, which departed Tokyo Haneda at 10:14 am on May 18.
“13 hours just gonna zip right by after all my personal devices die,” the passenger continued in a post on Reddit.
The flight time for this ultra-long transpacific flight is normally completed within around 12 hours, but once you factor in taxi times, then 13 hours is very realistic.
Of course, when it comes to technical defects, there are two very different distinctions in the airline industry. There are system-critical issues that need to be remedied before the plane is legally allowed to take off, and then there’s everything else.
The former is sometimes referred to as the MEL, which stands for ‘Minimum Equipment List’: Essentially, a very complicated list of everything that has to be working on a plane for it to be considered airworthy.
There are certain items in the passenger cabin that are in the MEL, but a working in-flight entertainment system and Wi-Fi definitely isn’t one of them.
In this type of situation, an airline is in a tricky situation. They can either delay the flight and risk people missing tight connections and onward travel arrangements in the hope that the problem can be fixed, or press ahead with the flight, even if the experience is going to be less than ideal.
When these kinds of issues occur at an outstation, the chances of getting the defect resolved are even less likely, so it’s normally a case of getting the plane back to the airline’s own hub.
In the case of a faulty IFE system, which is likely connected to the in-seat power and potentially the Wi-Fi, all an engineer at an outstation is going to be able to do is turn it off and reboot it, just like you might at home with your computer.
If that fails, then hard luck.
That appears to be exactly what happened aboard United flight 804 on Monday. Not a great look for an airline whose chief executive lobbied the Trump administration in the hope of acquiring rival American Airlines with the intent of creating the world’s most premium airline.