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In-Air Entertainment Keeps Evolving


In 1911, just eight years after the Wright Brothers flew the first aircraft at Kitty Hawk, the pop song inviting Josephine on the newfangled flying machine was already on the market.

A decade later, an in-flight silent movie,”Howdy Chicago”, was projected to passengers on a flight over the Chicago World's Fair. Regular in-flight movies didn’t start for another 40 years, when the now-gone TWA showed them in their first-class areas in 1961.

Since then, the advances have been rapid. Video games and small bulkhead TV sets emerged in 1975. Individual seat-back video started on some airlines in 1991, followed a decade later with live in-flight TV.

Many airlines now have seat-back multi-channel screens that beam out movies, games, live TV and advertising. Along with those airline-provided items, many passengers now carry their own private all-inclusive entertainment, with laptops, SmartPhones, E-readers and dozens of newfangled electronic miracles.

With airlines continuously seeking new ways to make extra bucks, passengers can expect more innovations in pay-per-view in-air entertainment in the near future.
Future Travel: LA to NYC In 45 Minutes By Tube! PDF Print E-mail


Ever since people in covered wagons took six months to make it from the East Coast to California, they’ve been trying to make the journey a bit shorter. By train, the schedule is about 40 hours. Today, by passenger jet, it takes about four hours.

Now, a company named ET3 predicts that within a few decades, a way to do it by an underground vacuum tube system will take you coast-to-coast in just 3/4 of an hour! ET3 calls it the Evacuated Tube Transport, a 4,000 MPH train that’s blasted through by magnetic levitation.

The whole concept sounds like something a magician would conjure in a stage act, or a super big one of those old department store message suction tubes. The ET passenger system would be made up of a line of six-person capsules in rows within the tunnel vehicle.

Even more ambitious, when the tubes can be constructed to extend under oceans, a trip from California to China could happen in just two hours, and even less from New York to London! When it becomes an entire world network of tubes, it will certainly revolutionize long-distance transportation, as well as shipping, as never before.

Can you imagine telling your family you’re tubing to Beijing for Sunday brunch, and will be back home in time for dinner? And then tubing for a midnight snack in London?
 
 
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