As I watched a final six movies across three flights, to complement the five I'd watched on my way over to the U.S., I repeatedly got the chance to imagine doing this as some sort of skit on Saturday Night Live.
As you would know if you've ever flown before -- which likely describes everyone reading this -- when a flight attendant or the captain is speaking, your movie freezes and often gets a printed text across the screen that reads something along the lines of "announcement in progress."
There are two primary ways they can try your patience when they do this:
1) Speak slowly, redundantly or with long pauses, where they refuse to release the intercom during the indulgent and stylized breaks between chunks of their dialogue, meaning you can't get back to what you're watching until they've finally stopped depressing the intercom button;
2) Release the intercom button, but then come back to say something else two to five second later, which means your movie has only a brief chance to resume before being rudely cut off again.
This is where the SNL skit would come in. In this skit, all this behavior would be exaggerated, and our hero would be some annoyed guy just trying to get through the remaining five minutes of his movie before the plane lands.
Now, I acknowledge that some of the information they're conveying to us can be useful, and we should listen. Collectively as a society of air passengers, we're now to the point where we so routinely ignore the safety instructions, that I think we probably would just run around, shitting ourselves, in the event of an actual water landing.
But sometimes, it's just a variation on that old school relationship between the pilot and the passenger, a remnant of yesteryear, when there really were a significant number of us who cared what major cities we were expected to pass over during the duration of our flight.
Well, I'm not here just to whinge, I'm here to tell you about what I thought was a really good workaround to some of this, used by Air New Zealand, which we were using for the first time ever to travel to the U.S. (We may have used it ten years ago when we actually went to New Zealand, though I can't remember, and if so, they were not doing the thing I'm about to tell you about at that time.)
Namely, some of these announcements are handled simply by a text that appears at the bottom of your screen as you're watching, a text you can manually dismiss once you've read it -- or even before you've read it, if you're fast enough.
Mostly this was used supplementally. Like, in their attempt to make interactions with the flight attendants offering meals more efficient, they'll remind us of what the breakfast options are -- remind us, because indeed, they did also tell us through one of these more traditional intercom interruptions.
But I more appreciated that the technology existed, rather than whether it was fully being used to excise superfluous communications.
I found I'm a lot more likely to read and absorb the information presented to me in such a pop-up than I am to hear and absorb it when someone is speaking it to me, with the sorts of long, deliberate pauses that only further annoy me as I am trying to watch a key moment of my movie, when I might tune it out from sheer frustration.
A pop-up, as it turns out, is not equally annoying, as it's something you control, and can leave on your screen for as long as it is useful to you, before dismissing it at a moment of your choosing. And it's at the bottom of the screen, so it is not really blocking the action on screen, nor cutting off any dialogue mid-sentence. What's more, it ensures you have a chance to actually take in what is being conveyed.
And those meal options, by the way? Well, Air New Zealand was also giving us some of the best airline food we've ever had. So we may use them again in the future, even if it involves one additional leg and more travel time overall.
(The image with this post, you ask? Well, since I decided it didn't really make sense to include the poster for any of the six movies I saw across three flights -- the first of which was actually a domestic flight on Delta -- I'm instead including a still from the current Air New Zealand safety video, which features Kiwi NBA player Steven Adams.)
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