Less panem, more circenses

Today, airlines plump for for production simplicity and quantity over variety in their inflight catering, particularly in economy, where Qantas’ generally well-received redesign involved a larger main meal and less of the rest.

Yet the selection in inflight entertainment has never been wider. That’s true both on longhaul services, where airlines are investing heavily in the latest generation of seatback on-demand video systems, and on shorthaul aircraft, where those same seatback systems are joined by an increasingly powerful and content-filled set of streaming boxes, which are essentially mini Netflix-on-a-plane hard drives that play videos over wifi.

The latter are appearing over an ever-wider set of airlines, too, with names that previously wouldn’t have been seen dead investing in improving the passenger experience now realising that it’s not just about keeping passengers focussed on something other than the pain in their knees, it’s about making the big bucks on inflight sales, now that the price for these systems is dropping and they can be linked in to the onboard trolley and supply systems. Looking at it cynically, more passengers can order more overpriced tat in addition to the three dollar cups of bad coffee if the 200 passengers on board can each place an order separately, rather than having to wait for the trolley to inch its way down the aisle.

But at the other end of the scale, innovation is coming too. This journalist has yet to see a convincing inflight use case for virtual reality headsets, although their use in industry-side cabin layout configuration is astounding: more than just the ability to say “what does this cabin look like from seat 64B if we change the seat fabric from puce to chartreuse”, it’s about figuring out whether an expensive new cabin is private enough for a variety of passengers, or where changes need to be made.

Yet private cinema goggles are already onboard some airlines, and as this technology shrinks in size and weight — and the embarrassment factor of strapping some ridiculously large headset to your face shrinks proportionally — look for more carriers to introduce them, especially in premium cabins. There’s something to be said for literally lying back in a business class bed and watching a movie at the most natural position for your head, rather than having to prop yourself up to see the screen, especially in HD.

Airlines and their suppliers are also figuring out how to get more content you want to watch onto the screen. That’s partly through adding extra onboard storage for films and television shows, but also through new technologies that offer you the chance to pre-select what you want to watch, and then automatically load it onto the aircraft.

Panasonic Avionics, the market leader in inflight entertainment systems, calls its version of this tech ZeroTouch, and the idea is that you use the airline app to decide you want to watch, let’s say, many hours of historical documentaries about your airline, or the full back catalogue of Star Trek: Voyager’s third season, or all the Bring It On movies. ZeroTouch loads those videos onto the aircraft automatically: over gate wifi, over a 4G LTE network, or even — if the combination of your class of travel, frequent flyer status, and the price of inflight satellite data is right — over the airline’s satellite system.

And it’s not just content: increasingly, travellers in the pointy end of the plane are finding a business class problem in the fact that their iPad provides a better picture with higher definition content than is available on the seatback. Zodiac Inflight Innovations has a solution: hot-swappable screens in its RAVE system that can be upgraded from 11” to 17” for premium cabins faster than a crew can clean the cabin. Previously, that kind of work would have taken days to uninstall and reinstall monitors.

• Airlines are upgrading the user-interface too, which gives existing screens a modern feel and improved usability.

• All the better to take your mind off the incredible shrinking economy seat.