zhasper2.0

Dear Singa­pore Airlines,

I love you. Really I do. Out of all two inter­na­tional air­lines I’ve flown, your by far the best. I’m only fly­ing cattle class, in your planes cattle can only be a ref­er­ence to those Japan­ese cows that live a hand-fed, daily mas­saged life.

It’s the little things you do so well that make the dif­fer­ence: the hot towel imme­di­ately on takeoff, recog­nising that just get­ting to the air­port can be a hard day. The fre­quent — it feels like every ten minutes, but is prob­ably more like once an hour — offers of a juice or water. I don’t do booze on flights, but the couple beside me do, and your staff have kept them sup­plied with beer and Baileys until they stopped whin­ing (the couple, not the staff — as far as I can tell, bring­ing a con­stant stream of booze for this couple ful­filled the child­hood dreams of the staff, judging by the looks on their faces)

I do apo­lo­gise — turns out they weren’t sated, just rest­ing — but once again the host­ess bring­ing the booze seem thrilled to be of ser­vice. It’s little things like that that make me return every week­end to my favor­ite local cafe, and will keep me return­ing to your airline.

You get the big things right too — last time I flew SQ, I had the abso­lute pleas­ure of rid­ing in an A380 from SIN to SYD. Being first to fly that plane, some­thing you’re right­fully proud of, is just a small demon­stra­tion of your comittment to remain­ing one of the world’s lead­ing airlines.

Right now I’m treat­ing myself to a runthrough of my Liv­ing End albums on my iPod. This is a real treat — their early work remains some of my favour­ite music of all time, and I don’t get to listen to it often enough.

As nice as this is, it’s not what I had in mind when I boarded your air­craft. You see, you’re fam­ous for your entairn­ment sys­tem, and again, rightly so. The games leave a bit to be desired, but your movie and TV selec­tion is second to none. It’s not just the num­ber of pro­grams — it’s the vari­ety! Hol­ly­wood, Bol­ly­wood, European and Chinese — you have a vast range of pro­gram­ming from all over the world. The first thing I did on boad­ing the plane was to per­use your enter­tain­ment guide and plan my next 8 hours of relaxation.

So why am I listen­ing to my own music? Because your entairn­ment sys­tem has failed me. It’s been off for over half the flight. It was off for over 90 minutes at the start of the flight. Even­tu­ally it came up, but minus the Video On Demand. Even so, I man­aged to watch some of Gomor­rah on broad­cast chan­nel 13 — but before the movie ended, the sys­tem rebooted again.

After a con­sid­er­able time with no enter­tain­ment the sys­tem came back. This time I decided to go for some­thing shorter, so I star­ted on some of the TV doc­u­ment­ar­ies. I man­aged a show about gar­dens in India, and most of another show, before the sys­tem crashed entirely. Still about 2 hours from Singa­pore, and my only enter­tain­ment is provided by the music I provided my self, and writ­ing you this rant.

I’m not going to pre­tend this means I won’t be back: an SQ flight with no enter­tain­ment still beats most car­ri­ers. I just want to let you know that flight SQ232 today was almost the per­fect flight — it was only your enter­tain­ment sys­tem that let you down.

I loom for­ward to fly­ing SQ again soon — my next three seg­ments are already booked, the last one once again on your A380, the first mere minutes after I get off this flight — and look for­ward on par­tic­u­lar to being reminded just how good your sys­tem can be when it’s working.