Scillybear

Having spent yet another 3 challenging days in Moscow, I must admit I was looking forward to seeing Harry Potter 5 (for the 3rd time!) on the 875 back from DME last night…

Unfortunately, I was out of luck and I was told (exact words) “The film failed to load at LHR on the outbound”

Harry Potter has the power to defeat Voldemort – but it seems he can’t find his way onto a 767 at LHR !!


So I watched “Evan Almighty” for the second time in 3 days –

No big problem really : flight landed safely, we were on time, and we had a good crew....

BUT – This is not the first time the wrong film has been shown on my DME runs….

I am just curious as to how it can happen… How can they load one film but not the other…?

Are there really two tapes and one gets left behind ?

Anyone Know ???

Smirnoff

You've actually had functioning IFE on a DME 767?

Smirnoff

Yes there are, I reckon, 5 tapes that should be loaded: one for the news, then there's the 2 movies for the out and back, and the 2 short entertainments tapes.

They are on ancient little video tapes (hi-8?) that get loaded into the video recorder behind the cockpit door.

Often the tapes are scrunched up and often one or two of the tapes are missing. But more often than not, even if they have the tapes, the quality of the flickering (or completely black) monitors and barely audible (in one ear) sound, means you can't watch anything anyway.

The consensus is, that the maintenance budget for the s/h 767s is just enough to stretch to a roll of grey coloured masking tape per day, which manages to hold the interiors together somehow.

Scillybear

And whose responsibility is it to make sure these get on board ?- the excuse I got last night seemed to indicate it was the films themselves ??

Surely 4 out of 5 of those tapes can stay in the aircraft for a whole month and the only one that really needs bringing on is the BBC news.....???


Over the years I have developed the ability to listen with one ear, endure flickering (and the occassional total loss of picture too !!).

I always have my glasses at the ready should the nearest monitor be asleep..... On the outward 874 this week I was caught out when the monitor directly in front of me decided to spring into life halfway through the film !!

phreegreens

I'd been wondering what held the engines on the ATH 767's, now I know.

All that time I thought it was the filler I used on my old 1970's mini.

Smirnoff

Have you been on one of the musical 767s?

The ones where the call bells start binging all at the same time. If it's midflight, you can have several hours of musical planes. Sometimes it stops by itself about about half an hour. Sometimes it's only one cabin, other times all three cabins bing in chorus.

We had a man down the trap door at door 1 the other day, trying to set the binging feature to silent.

vla

Really?! I'm not entirely certain Dixons even stock those anymore, and surely BA would have to transfer the content to Hi-8 themselves for broadcast (because where else are they going to get new content in that format?). Wow, commiserations.

phreegreens

No I've missed that treat, but to be fair my regular x2/month commutes to ATH finished a year or so ago, so maybe this is a recent enhancement.

I did once have a 767 seat in CE (and I couldn't move as the cabin was full), that did things that you would normally only allow a colonic surgeon to do, after administering copious amounts of general anesthetic.

I had to ask the crew for a pillow to sit on and I'm sure the other pax must have thought I was having a bad day in the "Chalfonts" department.

David-A

They don't just go out and buy their content off the high street shelves!
(I'm sure you know that)

They will be given a master to integrate into their content, supplied in some format or another, probably mostly digi-beta.

Now there are entire companies dedicated to preparing content for in flight on airlines, they will also prepare the content and supply it on the (variety of) media formats and standards that the given airline requires for the fleet.

[Don't know about BA, but there are def. some IFE systems using VHS-C (compact VHS) cassettes, amongst others]

However, big however, just because the tape format is physically the same, that doesn't mean it being used in the same way as the tape is used domestically. These tapes will certainly have multiple tracks, could be being used in a proprietary digital way, etc.