Best/Worst Inflight Entertainment

In your opinion, which of the airlines you have flown offers the best inflight entertainment – both audio and visual. Does this airline offer PTVs for all passengers? What is so good or bad about the entertainment?

For me, United was very good. We always had a choice of at least 3 films on our own PTV in economy. The audio side of things was good, too. Apart from the dreadful sound of “American Pop Stars” singing Disney songs, “From the Flight Deck” was great. Live audio from the flight deck. During takeoff, climb, descent and landing, it was brilliant with lots going on.

Our 777 aircraft offered more in the way of entertainment than the 767 and the 747 (according to the brochure).

As for the worst entertainment, JMC (Now obviously Thomas Cook) performed very poorly on our 9 hour flight to the Dominican Republic three years ago. Not only did my headphone socket not work, but they showed us “Yellow Submarine” on one screen. Audio entertainment was extremely limited and the flight seemed like more than 9 hours. I’m sure that JMC/TCX have come a long way since those days though – best thing they probably done was to get rid of the DC-10s.

I get annoyed with long haul airlines which have a total lack of entertainment of any kind. I now come to the airline I love (and hate) so much. Thai Airways International. When you are on an 11h 30min flight to Bangkok and back again, you want to be entertained. Listening to “The Emporer’s New Clothes” by Elton John over and over again on one audio station drove me insane. And for a long haul airline not to offer PTVs in any of their three classes is very disappointing. The television screens in economy in particular are very poorly distributed around their 747 cabins. We are in the 21st Century and this long haul airline offers no real entertainment. On such long flights, passengers should be able to choose what they watch, not have some amateurish US comedy screened instead. We are flying on exactly the same flights in March as we did in July – TG917/910. Since these flights depart at 9.30pm and 1.10am, we sleep most of the way, but day time flights must be hell!