Originally Posted by
GMoneyCO
I have had good luck getting my Bose QC35 II headphones to pair and stay connected with the bluetooth IFE but have not had any luck getting my Bose QC Airbud IIs to stay connected. They will connect and stay connected for a few seconds and then disconnect. No issues with this occurring with any other devices, just United iFE. What I have noticed is that when bluetooth on the IFE is set to "On" everything works but as soon as it automatically turns to off after a connection is established, audio drops. The issue seems to be more of a bluetooth implementation issue on the IFE system and not with the headphones themselves. I was looking forward to downsizing my travel bag and leaving the QC35s at home most of the time but looks like I'll need to keep them around for the bluetooth flights in addition to longhaul where IFE requires a cord still.
Based on the number of times I've crashed the IFE (which, even though it has nothing to do with flight systems still unsettles me a bit on the Max) and some of the messages I've seen generated the seats are running a relatively long-in-the-tooth but popular for embedded systems version Android (8.x or 9.x if I had to guess) and as far as I can tell the user interface for Bluetooth paring, etc. on the seats is just hooking the Android BT API calls and prettifying them, so it's possible the QC Airbud is expecting newer/fancier BT at a protocol level (or a different audio codec) than the seat actually supports.
I've generally had very good luck with my QC35 IIs on the Max except the number of Seat 2As I've been in seems like it might be starting to confuse things -- last Max aircraft I was on it took more tries than normal and when it finally got connected my headphones announced something like "Connected to Seat Two Eh Twelve" but once connected it has always worked through duration of flight for me.