No, No , No...Never would I expect them to break the rules, nor would I be upset if they don't. It is all about the attitude. With UA, I was being 'processed'. With LH, I was being 'HELPED'. Had I not made the LH flight, I would have written a similar report.

Does that make UA the star of the story? Had a UA rep walked me over to LH and assisted in the matter, THEY would have been the stars. I was passed off to another line, another company, which was out of their hair. In my business that is called getting rid of the problem, rather than taking care of it. And remember, I'm not one of those 'difficult' passengers. I'm they guy that smiles through these situations.

Didn't I say 'in my experience' ? I thought I had. I have not flown every airline, so I cannot compare to all. However, 'IN MY EXPERIENCE' UA is one of the worst business classes. The worst was Martin Air!

Sure..

The controls are a little complex, but they have some hotkey positions.

The kickback and relax (recline) position reclines, well, lifts the bottom cushion, and raises the legrest into a position that is like an anti-gravity chair. VERY comfortable here. I'm a lumbar back sufferer, and I was very pleased.

The BED psoition takes some getting used to. It is certainly flat, but not horizontal. At first I slid down the bed, which was disconcerting. After a bit, I got used to it and found a slide-free position, curled into fetal position on my side. I slept VERY well. They have a little privacy screen designed to keep you from getting up close and personal with the pseenger next to you, but it was small enough to be useless. The cushions are a bit hard, but I am a firm bed person, so it was to my liking. Key point here is that you can sleep on your side, and that is a good thing!

Other gadgets in the seat:

POWER
One kicking features was the in-seat power. Most airlines that have in-seat power have the 'Airline adapter'... you know, the old proprietary Empower connection. That used to be fine for me, but since my trips are long, I carry a monster laptop (17" P4 3.2 Fujitsu N6010) which carries with it a 150 watt power supply. None to the airpline adapters you can buy support it. Lufthansa has good old standard outlets, so you can simply plug in your normal power supply.

INTERNET
My flight had WIFI access ($30 for the flight). It was fairly fast. I had about 256K connection, which was enough for me to do something that pretty much freaked other people out. I powered up the laptop, plugged in my bluetooth dongle, put on my bluetooth headset, loaded up Skype, and started making and taking phone calls via the net conenction ,walking up and down the aisle. It worked like a charm! I did get a couple of 'you can't use your cell phone here' comments :-)

TV
My unit didn't work, but for those that had theirs working, it was nice and big. I looked like it was a 10.4" LCD. The system runs on Windows CE, it appears that they are having many problems with the system, as rebooting was a regular thing I noticed. But then again, I have similar problems with my BMW ;-)

MEALS
The food simply sucked, but I learned long ago to eat as little in-flight as possible no matter how good or bad the food is, so no loss there.

All in all, it all boiled down to three things: The bed was great, the net was great, and the service was 1st class.

-m

LOL! You have to use the privacy screen in conjunction with your tray table! That's why the releases for both tray tables are located right in the middle divider between the twin seats. Just release the tray table by pressing the respective button, but don't unfold the tray. The released tray, in conjunction with the smaller screen you already mentioned, provides for perfect privacy when your seat is in bed mode. And no, this isn't me improvising, the thing was actually constructed to work this way. Funny that you didn't realize the magic behind that piece of German engineering.

Oh, and yes, it pays off to be a nice guy. 90% of my flying is with LH, on longhauls always in C or F (mostly upgrades), so I know the product very well and have a good idea of LH's variance regarding service quality and consistency. By being nice and connecting to the staff (and please never confuse being nice with sucking up, which usually doesn't leave a good impression), I have received several op-ups and, on many occasions, superior treatment. Of course, YMMV, and there have also been a few bad episodes with LH staff. Luckily, being nice doesn't mean one has to be weak. When somebody treats me badly or trys to take away my rights despite me being nice, I'm very much able to change gears and get what I'm entitled to. But of course it's so much better to achieve this goal while EVERYBODY's feeling good about it.

Well, to get 1st class service, you have to fly First Class, even with LH. Trust me. Unlike UA, there's a huge difference between C and F.

Regarding WIFI: You are the reason for many in the UA forum demanding to block Skype access as soon as UA introduces on-board internet on some of their planes next year. Especially the "walking down the aisle" behavior might be quite annoying to other pax, especially to those trying to sleep.

Regarding IFE: Windows CE sucks. Seems like the system can't handle the load when distributing the requested information to each seat on a fully booked flight - so it crashes. My sources say that LH is trying to further compress the information (like movies) to enhance system stability (but at the cost of quality). LH is very, very unhappy with the Honeywell folks.

Oh, now I just feel dumb! Now that you mention it, that makes perfect sense!!!

Yeah, BIG difference!

All I can say to that is that I can hardly imagine better service than I got. They were nothing short of fantastic.

You make a very solid point. Frankly, I just did it for about 10 minutes... more out of curiosity than anything.... i.e. Can I maintain a solid Skype connection? I slept mos of the flight :-) I could just see two or three people walking up and down the aisles, yapping away at all hours. That would just suck.

However, blocking Skype would be useless. That would just kill Skype. What about other VOIP services? Moreover, we are finishing up an Asterisk install at our office, so we could just as easily use that, and assign any port we want, making blocking impossible. All they can do is make another rule they will need to enforce. Another issue is that as voip becomes more popular, use of Skype and other voip service will soak up what little bandwidth is available on the plane.

From what I saw (remember, I'm in the software biz), each seat has a dedicated CE device. I'm not sure what the server is running for an OS, but the controller's UI felt like it it was running on top of Linux. CE is a good choice becuase it is so light. If you have a dedicated app running on CE, it can be extremely stable. As a private pilot, I rely on CE to provide the UI for my primary navigation, and have never had a crash.

I can't think of any reason that compressing the data more would cause a CE device to be more stable. To the contrary, the more you compress it, the more horsepower the device will need to decompress. My guesses (without really understanding the problem) would be more in the area of hardware problems (bottlenecks), codec problems, or just plain sloppy programming.

That having been said, I have seen these problems on airlines enough in the past that I would love the opportunity to design & implement such a system. from scratch. Amo0ng many improvements I would love to implement, these could be made modular such that onboard crew could easily fix just about any problem in-flight with no training.

Correct! That's why I said the guys in the UA forum WANT to block it, even though that endeavor would be quite futile. In any case, they really wanna proactively regulate it, which I found strange, as 99% of the "pro regulation guys" had never tried Connexion and didn't really know if it was annoying or not.

And regarding IFE: From what I was told, the major bottleneck must be on the server side, as usually the entire system crashes. A single reboot can take up to 20 minutes, at least with the 1st generation software they got on those A343s running MUC-LAX and MUC-PVG, which were the first planes to be reconfigured with new C (they removed F on these a/c). LH has a new software now (on more recently reconfigured a/c) which enables AVOD. I tested it in April on MUC-CLT in enhanced F (witch a touch screen), worked flawlessly. But then I hear horror stories from the new MUC-ORD and MUC-IAD routes featuring new C and enhanced F (purser being busy issuing compensation miles to pax and desperately trying to fix malfunctioning C seats).

IFE control in incredibly slow. The system often need a few seconds just to react to a "mouse click", so it takes ages to navigate through the menus. Pax don't care if this is due to CE or the server OS (or any combination of it), they just hate the end result. And LH hates it, too.

I guess nobody on the IFE design team ever heard of load balancing or failover :-)

Shhh...
http://www.skypejournal.com/blog/arc..._air_heads.php

You are one lucky guy! I happen to agree with you though. Being nice always seems to get the best results!!
Julie