100 mile drive

[Kenneth Wuepper]

Frank,
What a great service you provide. Private shows for customers traveling a long distance.
Great to be able to drive to a special place where you are the only customers for a show.
You certainly must treat them well or they would not return.

[Vern Dias]

I once acquired one of those highly modified 16mm proj's used by INFLIGHT ENTERTAINMENT SERVICES. I wound up cannibalizing it for parts to fix another machine. I still have a couple of the large 16mm reels for it. They have a large, non-standard size spindle hole, abt 3 or 4 in in diameter, so you can't use them on a regular projector, although I have seen pictures of someone who modified several of them to fit on any 16mm that could hold normal large reels.

I worked for Inflight Motion Pictures for a few years at ITO (Hilo, HI.) back in the late 60's early '70s. The projectors were Kodak. Lamps were MARC-300. The reels were mounted horizontally (think platters) and actually sat on a hub with 3/8 or 1/2 " pins (can't remember any more), which had spring loaded balls to keep the reels in place during turbulence. Mostly we serviced United DC-8-61 aircraft, less frequently Western and Braniff 720's All Inflight stations were measured by the percentage of completed showings. Our station always ran 99.5% plus, others didn't always do so well.

The United 747's had a different setup from Bell & Howell that had larger reels that could hold two features and only needed to be serviced for the outbound trip. This was done to eliminate labor costs at the remote stations, whereas our system could only hold 1 feature and required service for each flight.

[Mike Blakesley]

We had a family drive 65 miles each way one night, and they were the only ones to show up. When the movie started, the dad came out and said they didn't feel right making us stay and run the movie just for them. I said, it's no problem, I've got bookwork to do so I'd be here anyway, which is my go-to line if we ever have a tiny crowd and they feel bad for "making us stay open" for them. I'll ask them if they have any particular trailers they want to see, and I tell them to come and let me know if they'd like the sound to be louder or softer, etc. Treat 'em like royalty and they'll talk about it all over town.

A theater down the road from us used to have a policy that if there was less than 5 people in the auditorium, they wouldn't show the movie, which I think is insane... having a tiny crowd is the perfect chance to make customers feel special and catered to. Why wouldn't you show the movie? How much are you losing, a few bucks in electricity? You can make it up on the busy nights.

[Frank Cox]

I've played movies for one person. (And did exactly that, one day last week.)

I figure that if someone makes the effort to come here to see a movie, there's no way I would feel right about telling him to beat it.

[Allan Young]

I was about to opine that a 16mm projector and 6,000ft reels of film must have imposed a significant weight penalty on the airlines, but 350 7" seat-back screens and a server box under one of the seats in each row likely adds even more weight. One of these systems even caused a major disaster.

The Swissair disaster occurred in the middle of the development of the system on which I was working at the time, and shortly after we'd installed it as a trial on a 747. The IFE industry being relatively small, we began hearing rumours that the Swissair system had caused the crash long before the information was made public. Shock, disbelief and more than a few sleepless nights ensued. Adding to the worry was that our system was eerily similar to the Swissair one (providing VOD, gaming, gambling, shopping and telephony).

Thankfully there were crucial differences. The Swissair system required a comms box at every seat and as such was only ever intended for the premium cabins - the extra weight involved ruled out providing the service in economy. Since all the installations were at the front of the plane, the power cabling was routed through the ceiling of the cockpit and it's believed that arcing in those cables ignited the fire. Ours had a box for every six seats and was installed at every seat. The servers and power supplies were installed in the galley areas and fanned out from there, negating the need for anything near the cockpit.

At least the Swissair system worked. After four years and the airline throwing over 40 million into the development, the project was cancelled. The technology of the time had enough trouble trying to feed six screens with video signals from a single box without excessive buffering, but a bigger problem was attempting to get those boxes to remain sufficiently responsive to user input.

[Leo Enticknap]

Off-topic veer alert - sorry.

Thanks - very interesting detail. Between 2001 and '13, I made between 3 and 5 transatlantic round trips a year (initially for work, and then, after I met my wife but before I emigrated in 2013, to see her as well) between Northern England and Southern California. During that time, IFE went from a three-tube CRT projector hung from the ceiling that projected onto the bulkhead (Northwest's DC-10s) to increasingly sophisticated seat-back screens. The picture from those projectors was so dim that unless you were within 5-6 rows of the bulkhead screen, you could forget about watching the movie. It must have been 1 to 1.5 ft-l at most, even with all the window shades down.

Ours had a box for every six seats and was installed at every seat. The servers and power supplies were installed in the galley areas and fanned out from there, negating the need for anything near the cockpit.

That sounds very similar to the systems that were on the A330s that replaced those DC-10s in around 2006-7. I quickly learned to avoid seat A in each row (unless I got lucky and got an exit row seat - in those days, they were first come, first served, rather than something you paid extra for), because the server box was under the seat in front of you, meaning that I had to sit with my legs at a 45-degree angle. Not nice for the 11 hours or so from Amsterdam to Portland!

The only regular flying I do nowadays is for my twice yearly service visits to a customer in Hawaii. I used to go on Delta, but when Southwest started flying to HI, I immediately switched to them, because they have daytime flights back to the mainland (as far as I can tell, they're the only airline that do), which avoids the 2-3 days of constant tiredness that I have to claw my way through after a red eye flight (when I was in my 20s and 30s I could take that hit pretty easily, but not now). There are no seat back screens on their 737s - it's strictly BYOD, connecting to their wifi and watching a selection of live TV or movies (presumably streamed from a local server on board the plane) on your phone or tablet. The live TV works solidly and reliably even over the middle of the Pacific, which is pretty impressive.

[Marcel Birgelen]

I remember getting Video-On-Demand right on 200 MHz MIPS boxes back in 2003. Fortunately, we had just one screen per box. The gruesome middleware that we used at the beginning used an embedded web-browser with some callbacks, but it was soon evident that this wouldn't fly. Our home-brew solution was later built in C and MIPS assembly, the only way to keep those boxes somewhat responsive.

Still, when I look at my modern smart TV, which has some factors more processing power than anything we could work with back then, the experience is eerily similar... choppy performance and hanging applications all over.

Modern-day IFE systems seem to have come a long way, gone are the days you need bulky servers and remote displaying solutions. I generally like the Thales system, like Emirates and Qatar seem to be using for all their planes, but even those systems seem to suffer from random weirdness now and then.

[Scott Norwood]

The last time I was on a plane was in December, 2019. It was a British Airways 747-400, which had a rather nice IFE system from Panasonic. They had a pretty big selection of movies, along with music and other entertainment programming. I watched a movie and it looked and sounded fine on the little screen, with the crappy earbuds that they supplied. It was the best IFE system that I have seen. Delta 767s and 777s seem to have a similar system, but with a less extensive title selection. Jet Blue and maybe some others have live satellite TV on board, which is a neat party trick, but the usefulness largely depends upon the time zone and one's programming preferences.

I usually prefer to read or sleep on planes, though. And I agree that airlines probably won't see IFE as being worth the cost or weight now that everyone seems to travel with a laptop or tablet.

I will never understand those airlines that use the weird dual-mono 1/8" connectors for headphones, though. A 1/4" TRS connector would be more durable, and a 1/4" or 1/8" TRS connector would be compatible with whatever headphones customers might already have with them. I suppose that anything electronic is better than the "air pipe" headphones that airlines used through the mid-'90s, though.