A Hat Tip to United

The location of just one United Club at O’Hare (ORD), one of United’s main hubs, through which I have transited countless times.

United Airlines details 6 big inflight entertainment updates, including all-new Control Tower map, by Zach Griff in The Points Guy, is thick with welcome news for frequent United fliers, of which my wife and I are two. (So far I have clocked 1,533,214 miles with United, and she has about double that. We are also both lifetime members of the United Club, thanks to her wise investment in a sweet deal offered by United decades ago—and withdrawn quickly after that.)

We are also both T-Mobile customers, which is why seeing this on my phone’s United app is always welcome:

It mostly works. Yes, it’s slow, but it is possible to get work done at altitude at no extra cost. Very nice.

Here’s the rundown of new stuff from United, according to Zach:

New 4K seatback screens“Bluetooth connectivity at every seat, making it possible to pair wireless headphones, including AirPods, with the entertainment systems.”Control Tower View: “This view allows you to pull up a map of the airfield that’s overlaid with all the aircraft around you. Clicking on each little plane brings up its call sign and operating airline… powered by the flight deck’s navigation systems and a live feed of planes from FlightAware.”Starlink is coming. This will be a huge boost in bandwidth for passengers connecting to the Net on flights.Channel 9 (now called “From the Flight Deck”) is still there.

Here is what that last item looked like, the last time I saw the option and shot it on a plane:

Two problems with this. First, it’s buried deep among entertainment options (Zach says it’s under the Audio tab). Second, most, if not all, pilots don’t bother with it. Back in the primitive Channel 9 days, more than half of United pilots turned it on (or left it on, if it was there by default). Or at least that was my experience. Zach:

That said, in recent years, United’s aviation enthusiast customers have complained that Channel 9 hasn’t been working. According to Green, the functionality is still very much available — it’s just that more and more pilots are choosing not to enable the feed.

“Pilots can turn it off if they don’t want people to hear whatever chatter is going on,” Green explained. All hope isn’t lost, though. “We know it’s a cool feature,” Green added. “We have it enabled as much as we can.” (That’s Dominic Green, United’s director of inflight entertainment.)

I suggest that United urge their pilots a bit more forcefully to turn the feature on. Fellow pilots and aviation buffs love having it there. And people afraid of flying also find it comforting to hear pilots sounding totally calm while flying through turbulence.

One more thing. While it would be nice to screen-share the seat-back screen from your own device, there’s this:

Extended displays aren’t coming soon

As more travelers bring their own tablets and laptops on board, I’ve always wondered why airlines don’t offer a screencasting feature on the entertainment screens. After all, it’s a lot easier to get work done with some additional screen real estate.

Turns out, United can already technically enable screencasting today, Green said, but a major issue will likely mean that flyers will never see this functionality.

“We’ve had a lot of pushback from our corporate partners that say they don’t necessarily want their staff using publicly available screens,” Green said.

It’s not that United would have access to any data; it’s that they don’t want nosy passengers snooping in on their neighbors.

Makes sense. But I think United could partner with Apple and Google to create Apple PlanePlay and Google Plane (or whatever names they want to come up with), so at least some personal apps could extend onto the seatback.

Anyway, progress.