Your stupid in-flight entertainment consoles are super annoying. Is air travel not sufficiently horrible already?

Haven’t we suffered enough, with the delays, and the pointless security pageantry, and the overbooking, and the prohibition on outside beverages, and the nickling-and-diming for basic human comforts? Do you really have to throw “Three and a Half Men” into the mix, too?

We’ll admit: There was a time, years ago, before personal media doohickeys became widely available, when it would probably have seemed kind of cool to put tiny teevees in the backs of the seats. But you didn’t have them then. Instead, you have them now. And the thing about now is that anyone who wants to watch videos during his flight can just bring along a Sandisk Sansa View. It’s slim and lightweight for easy portability, and it holds eight gigs’ worth of video. (It’s got a microSD™ expansion slot for more memory, too.)

Plus, every Sansa View owner can stock his or her media player with stuff he or she actually wants to watch. That beats channel-surfing from New York to Chicago only to discover that in-flight TV hasn’t got any better programming than terrestrial TV. Hey, “Everybody Loves Raymond” is on. Click. Hey, “The Amazing Race” is on. Click. Hey, Sean Hannity is on. Click. Hey, they’re showing “Marley and Me.” Click.

“Hey,” we can almost hear in-plane boob-tube apologists whinging, “if you don’t like it, turn it off! Some people appreciate a distraction from the stress of flying.”

First of all, if you pulled passengers’ toenails out with pliers, it would also distract them from the stress of flying. That doesn’t mean we’d be grateful. And secondly, we’ve found that you can’t actually turn the sets off. (Well, you can, but they just keep reanimating themselves every twenty minutes or so, coming back at you over and over like a slasher movie villain.)

So here’s our proposal: We’ll make the Sandisk Sansa View available at a perfectly reasonable price—well within the reach of anyone who can afford your colossally expensive fares—and you’ll ditch these horrible little seat-back TVs. Fair? That way, everyone who wants to watch videos will be able to, and the rest of us won’t feel so much like Ludovico Technique test subjects. We’ll even show people where to buy a docking speaker for it, though we hope they won’t use that on planes.

Then, with the money you save by not having to operate your awful in-flight “entertainment” system, maybe you can go back to bringing us a cocktail once in a while. Everybody wins.

Back to top