For those of you contemplating ways of covering up the ads:
This is the same airline that beat the shit out of that doctor because the airline overbooked the flight. For your own safety, do not cross this airline.
The Chicago Department of Aviation did that. The same way if the police ends up killing someone, it was not the person calling the police.
United was booting passengers to make room for employee transfers though, the situation was shit before dept of aviation even got the call.
Those employees could have stood. Frontier and Spirit give vouchers out when they intentionally overbook.......which before the pandemic was everyday. If nobody takes the bait, they up the voucher value. For them it's essentially monopoly money.
If United couldn't get anybody to bite at the vouchers, then the employees should have stood the whole flight. Instead, they beat a man who was not fighting back physically. He only insisted that he get to his patient. They LITERALLY dragged him off the plane. By his ankle, as he tried to grab onto anything he could.
If United couldn't get anybody to bite at the vouchers, then the employees should have stood the whole flight.
Yeah, that is not a solution. The FAA is salivating at the thought of this. Everyone must have a seat for takeoff and landing.
That’s not how FAA regs work. There is no such thing as standing room on a plane.
Sure, but telling someone to leave their plane for some oddball reason is "only bad" not outright crazy like what happened then.
That seems incredibly stupid. A doctor can afford to sue.
he wasn't white, so they didn't assume he was a doctor
i think we should make them afraid to cross us
I got screeched at for covering up a super bright blinking light on a red eye. Their FAs are next level stupid.
"The incident is widely characterized by critics as an example of mishandled customer service."
Made me laugh, that's putting it lightly..
They mishandled the shit out of him.
“The incident is widely characterized by critics as an example of mishandled manhandled customer service.”
Just a typo.
Holy shit what a ride that was.
It's clear from a lot of stories like this (severe customer mistreatment) that United employees are miserable people who hate their jobs but this is nuts. I hope Dr. Dao got a huge settlement from United.
Is United Express actually United? I thought those tended to be a regional carrier using the name under license.
I'd expect the labour friction to be still worse; I was peripherally involved with such a firm 20 years ago and know they had terrible problems with staff retention, mostly because they wouldn't pay enough to retain people after they got fed up with the free-standby-flight privileges.
United is Four Seasons compared to American.
Wow. Even Trump thought they went too far. Damn.
And the CEO who brushed that assault off ‘suffered’ a ‘delayed promotion’. Poor thing. For saying that stuff about anyone, let alone a customer, he should have been fired, no golden parachute.
I think the doctor’s patients should have sued the airline too, since no doubt having their doctor pounded to a pulp caused them to miss their appointments.
Overbooking should be a mandatory minimum compensation of the greater of 1000x the ticket price or $20k. It's a truly fucked up practice to disrespect people's time like that.
Oh, we'll just refund you the cost of the ticket. That was the whole cost, right?
It's a contactless carrier, they already have my card on file.
"If you don't like it don't fly"
Seriously just shut up.
Edit: LMAO just saw your other comment where you actually said this sincerely. You're a parody of yourself.
Comedy is an art form. You need to commit to the joke.
Have you ever turned a screen off on one of these planes? They turn back on. So you turn them off again. Sooner or later, they turn back on. And repeat.
Worse, you will be surrounded by them on all sides, as others don't bother... :-(
I have. It usually stays off until they rig the cabin for final approach. Comes back on for landing but hey, whatever?
I'm getting beaten up for my stance here, but seriously: if all it takes to put you over is some midflight ads the do the rest of us a favor and don't fly. Take a train or whatever.
Y'all are acting like they're gonna strap us down and tape our eyes open like that Alex Whasisname kid in A Clockwork Orange. I assure you that doesn't happen for another 22 years in this timeline (give or take).
People like you constantly give corporations an inch because "it's not a big deal" and here we are.
Hot take. Tell me more about me?
I saw you eat food dropped in a toilet.
I don't think you're being beaten up for it. I certainly am not beating you up for it. But usually, yeah, the screen does come back on during the flight. I think they turn it back on automatically every time there's an announcement. As somebody who finds screens like that very distracting and even migraine-inducing (the "busyness" of that sort of thing is a big trigger), it's really frustrating.
Where can I book a train to Europe?
Depends on the plane and system it has. Last United flight I was on it stayed off the entire flight. I use my phone and generally don’t look at it anyway but it was nicer I suppose.
Let's have you build a train line to Europe eh?
I honestly couldn't care less how many adverts they show me, they can have a constant stream of adverts the whole flight if it means that some shitty corporation is paying a portion of my travel coats.
People really need to grow up about stuff like this, if you don't want adverts then pay for a premium service - I'm poor, I'll accept the adverts.
That money isn't subsidizing your flight cost, it's increasing corporate profits.
Here's the thing: companies have learned they can add ads to make additional money without passing any of that on to their customers.
If you think you're going to get a better rate for having ads, you're fooling yourself. They'll always charge as much as they can get people to pay and that amount isn't affected by ads most of the time.
This is thinking based on emotion not reality, most of the internet is free because of adverts so your belief that it's not used to lower prices is clearly silly. Yes companies love profit but they often increase profits by lowering prices to attract more business, it's a perfectly valid business model to use adverts to reduce the cost to the customer and increase customer volume.
No, you can't.
You can if you’re a Party member
You can, there's a button combo. It changes sometimes but if you spam a few things I can always black it out
But that's not the point, it still sucks
This should count as violation of human rights. You're chained to the seat for hours and have no other option than look at this screen or force your eyes closed. Holy shit, people should get really mad. Flashing ads on a screen you don't look at directly are still very annoying, even if you look on your phone.
I need to start a business selling rectangular shaped covers for these displays. I’ll even make one that serves as a holder for an iPad, so you can substitute your own screen.
I fold the flight safety manual and hang it over the screen with a tab, inserted into the folding gap above the screen.
This guy Uniteds
Duct tape
Make them magnetically attach to the screen.
You can turn off the TV dude
In my experience, that's only temporary. The screen will always wake up again on United flights.
I wasn't aware they glued your eyelids and head directly facing the screen
Found the boot licker
You can literally not watch things if you don't want to.
Read a book.
🥾👅
Boot licking is when you are not easily distracted by shiny lights.
It's when you suck oligarch cock
Y'all behave like they put a gun up to your head and force you to watch them ads lmao.
It's mental how the simple thought of maybe do something else than watch the ads is met with such hostility lmao.
You know what doesn't have ads (yet, anyway)? Mother fucking books.
You know what you can take on a plane with you? A mother fucking book.
Read a book.
You when billion dollar companies want to literally shove more ads in your face:
I am just so, so tired of being constantly inundated with being told to CONSUME.
What else would you like to do? seize the means of production?
Yeah, but no one wants to join my radical anti-government militia.
Well, they do, but I'm in TN so it's for the wrong reasons.
If you're in a plane, you deserve it.
thanks, I'll just abandon my family
Shouldn't be that far away from them in the first place if you actually cared.
This is fucking hilarious. Do you know that sometimes, people go elsewhere for economic opportunities? Then they bring their children after they get settled in?
Sometimes they go back, and leave the children there.
Do you think those kids should be stranded?
I don't care lol.
Work where you live, it's not that hard.
sometimes people don't want to live in the middle of nowhere forever. not many engineering jobs there. we all want economic mobility too
The ultimate quest for wealth is worth destroying the planet.
Also vast majority of people take planes for leisure, I'm sure we can deal without them. People used to travel the world in sail boats and they still managed to get where they wanted to go.
I don't think you understand - I can live poor and destitute without a job in my hometown, or leave to find work somewhere else. This is the reality of many Americans in rural America.
This isn't a quest for "wealth", it's a quest for life
Aw, port little american, need to pollute more in order to go and earn more money
A) to go and earn any money
B) I actually pollute less in the place that I moved to since I don't have to drive a car
Sure sure, whatever helps you justify the fact you're in a plane instead of using greener travel methods.
Lmao, it's cute how you think you have some moral/ethical high ground here. Wouldn't be at all surprised if you have this view because no one would want you around no matter where you happened to be. Run along little troll.
I don't need to fly a plane to find people who like me :)
We tried that in the 80s already. Here's how it went down.
1980s comes along, and people had been seeing commercials on tv for years. So along comes this new concept. Now you can PAY to watch tv.....without ads. GREAT!
So people started paying for this new "cable tv". Then the cable operators were like "I know they're paying to not see ads......but what if we STILL showed ads, and STILL took their money????"
So that happened.
Then after some decades Netflix came around, originally with liscensed tv shows from all over tv.......except now you could PAY to watch them, without the ads. And then they drastically lost their liscensed content, and produced their own original content.
After a few decades, Netflix said "I know they're paying not to see commercials.......but what if we STARTED showing commercials, AND raised prices every few months."
Man, I can't wait for the next guy to charge me money to not see ads. Only to inevitably show me ads a few years later....
I do look forward to the next generation of ad free media consumption powered by a small VC startup fund that has a bunch of low cost fresh-out-of-university students paid mostly in stocks working in a garage to say "yeah fuck this I've seen ads all my life in gonna do make something that doesn't make people hate life"
Each iteration of the technology eventually becomes hot garbage. But man, for like a decade there shit is pretty good while the rest of the entrenched industry is stuck trying to pay lobbyists to get law makers to write rules that neither side understands just to have them ultimately not get passed or not address the issue and those companies still disappear.
What if I were to buy back all my own DVDs and watch them? Would I need to voluntarily show myself ads later?
Targeted, individualized, advertising should be illegal. This will gut a lot of the motivations for the privacy invasions and data harvesting. This is how advertising worked for thousands of years. I think it could continue to be just fine.
The amount of resources humanity is spending on targeted advertising is extremely depressing when you consider the opportunity cost. There are thousands of engineers and product managers that spend all day on this stuff instead of anything useful.
This is an interesting idea!
So I am going to sit down and the screen will be full of penis enlargement pills? What will all the hot singles in the area think?
You'll be in a new city by supper. Who cares what they think?
If you're getting targeted ads for penis enlargement pills, then the system thinks you have a small pp. If this is an error, you should submit photographic evidence to their office to prove you don't have a small pp.
Insert penis here
..that will now reflect the information United has compiled on individual travelers, like where they live and destinations they've traveled to.
I, for one, can't wait to have my personal info proudly displayed to whatever randos they seat next to me! /s
fuck with the algorithm make it show ads for porno and then they'll stop doing it
I assume they won't allow porns in ads, but you can still get worse stuff than porn, like erectile dysfunction medication ads which causes people around your seat to look at you with sorry eyes.
Yeah, this is going to be hell for flight attendants having to deal with rightfully upset passengers.
Or just corrupt it till its weird ass surreal local ads. May take some work though.
About a decade ago Fox News got brought to court, and had to defend themselves against the idea that their content wasn't actually factually accurate most of the time. Therefore not "news".
Fox responded by saying that their program wasn't meant to be news. I forget the exact quote, I'm sure duckduckgo is your friend, but it was along the lines of "No reasonable person would ever consume Fox News content and believe it to be trustworthy accurate news. It is an opinionated entertainment show about the news."
I don't remember their tagline at the time, but it was something along the lines of "Fox News is your only outlet for unbiased news!" Something to that effect. I just remember Jon Stewart calling out the hypocrasy of their tagline being the exact opposite of what they said in court.
If Fox News is entertainment meant to push the agenda that the right is right, and if CNN is entertainment meant to push the agenda that the left is right, then I don't see why The Onion can't join them as entertainment meant to push the agenda that the whole world is fucking stupid.
Still operating as a "real news source", except it's all bullshit like Fox News and CNN. Just entertainment.
Same thing happened with "VitaminWater", a product in the category of "enhanced water" (a term reminiscent of "enhanced interrogation technique"). Coca-Cola argued that, despite the name, no reasonable person would believe it's actually healthy. They settled.
More to consider when selecting an airline. Greedy fuckers, I hope their stock takes a nosedive thanks to this
It'll probably take a small dip and then rise quite a bit once profits from implementing it start rolling in
‘Capitalism breeds innovation’
The innovation
Seriously. It's nearly a sure thing. I should buy on Monday and see how it goes. People are sleepwalking about adtech shit so they'll continue to fly United. There's already a dude in this thread telling people to chill and just don't fly if they don't like it. The ad revenue should be pretty juicy, too. They have a bored captive audience identified by full name and credit card number.
And if it succesful, or at least passenger doesn't boycott them over it, it is just a question of time until other airlines adds it as well
Part of the problem is that UA is such a massive airline, odds are any alternatives would involve quite a bit of sacrifice. Not many people would be willing or can afford to take an extra 2 layovers or 50%+ extra travel time or cost in order to get to where they want to go 🫤 That's not to say I won't try my best to avoid UA though, I was already sick of them after my last trip and now I find this news.
What's the ROI on ads anyway? I feel like ads are just a way to funnel money between corps. People who are forced to see ads are really not even the point anymore. This is like corporations subsidizing other corporations. Don't even matter that you buy that item being shown to you.
I always wondered this too.
Found a website saying Youtube adviews are $100-300 per 10k (ad views, not video views). That's 1-3¢ per view. If we assume an ad is 10seconds, then your time is worth 0.1-0.3¢ per second, or $3.60-10.80 per hour.
An A380 looks to be 380-615 seats. I'd imagine they're more often optimising for space, so let's say 550.
Long haul flight, 10% of people at any time using inflight stuff, 8 hours, 4 ads per hour = 5500.18*4 ads watched. 1760 ads. There will be a massive premium for planes, but surely only one order of magnitude more (e.g. 10x). That's equivalent to give or take 20k YouTube adviews which would be $200-600 per flight.
There are a lot of planes in the sky every single day though....
The thing is, it's only a ROI if any of those passengers converts to a buyer. The act of seeing an ad creates no value for the manufacturer unless they are converted to a buyer.
What you are describing is a market that has the consumer (ad watcher) almost completely removed from the conversion of capital. Being forced to watch an ad, in this case, only benefits the airline by their receiving ad revenue. The passengers are nearly supflourous.
ROI from adverts is always a shitshow though. If you come off a plane and see and buy it, is it because you just saw an advert for it, or were you always going to buy it. There is of course stats that may show number of impressions vs. total purchases trend, but its still just massive correlation that I imagine there is a bunch of people pulling spreadsheets together to justify their marketing spend. Anecdotally, I've heard of data teams working with marketing teams and just going "whelp, whatever you need to justify your job", etc.
Real ROI via direct sales though, that's somewhat measurable since you have a direct cost of acquisition (sales person salary, overheads, etc) vs revenue.
Including the opt out link in the announcement article is a good guy move on the writer's part. Thanks, Kate. You're a pal.
I requested opt out and they requested my ID. lol! So they’re demanding more info to opt out of info collection.
How are they going to identify who is opting out without being able to match it to the person in the seat..?
Your united data is going to be tied to an email. They could just use that. It's reasonable to see this as further invasiveness, similar to Meta™ account recovery.
Email validation.
Say you're from California on the form and it'll change what you have to enter. You don't have to put in an address or verify CA residency.
That’s what I did. It says they’ll be following up to get ID.
Weird, I didn't see that. fingers crossed it's a bluff lol
“I’m sorry ma'am but could you please remove your jacket from the seat? It’s obstructing the ads and we have a very clear policy about that”
🙃
They could come up with some bullshit like, obstructing your screen is interfering with the display of critical airplane safety information or something.
To begin the flight, please drink Mountain Dew Verification Can.
Verification Can Invalid. Please drink Mountain Dew Verification Can.
ERROR! Passenger attempting to steal Premium Ad-less Flying Option! Adding your name to the No Fly List and automatically deducting penalty fee from your credit card.
Remember when the assholes at United overbooked a flight and sent someone to knock a doctor's teeth out and carry him off a plane? The doctor refused since he was on his way to oversee the opening of a clinic he founded for veterans.
He and his wife started the clinic as a way to thank American servicemen and women, because he was plucked out of ocean waters by the U.S. Navy as he fled communism in his home country of Vietnam about 44 years ago, he said.
United will kill your dog, bust up your guitar, and knock down and drag out your doctor. They've made the headlines for all three of those. And the guitar guy made a song about United.
Unfortunately, the other airlines aren't much better.
This just confirms my decision to never fly United again
Their seats did that for me. I'm 5'11", not a giant, and my knees were straight up jammed into the seat in front of me. Completely insane that they're even legally allowed to sell those to people as seats. They might fit a child.
What did it for me was a long delay that got me landed at my destination after car rental was closed
Not so much the delay itself; that upset me, but I get that things happen
It was the reason for the delay: a simple maintenance thing with the plane had them taking the engine further and further apart while we watched from the terminal, ultimately deciding they weren't getting this thing back up and running again anytime soon and having to get us another plane (which we had to wait for to fly to us)
Why couldn't they figure it out? Because they didn't have anyone who knew how to work on that plane model available
There are so many ways that pisses me off and makes me never want to trust them again
Also, every flight I had with them, including the return trip that I'd already booked from that trip, was miserable
Say what you will about Southwest but they know their damned planes inside and out and overall run their fleet efficiently and consistently. It's like riding a bus that flies
I've reluctantly come to the same conclusion.
The median age for an A&P licensed plane tech is 55. We'll welcome you to the ranks anytime.
I have no idea what it is you're trying to say here or how it relates to an airline running planes without having maintenance crews that can actually do the work on them... And that they worked on it anyway without apparently having the required training for it...
This comment directly speaks to your lack of understanding of how airline maintenance works. The point though is there are a shortage of maintenance personnel in the industry. People are retiring all the time and nobody is filling those billets once they leave. And airlines don't just have a maintenance crew at every airport because there's not enough, and it wouldn't be cost effective. Be as angry as you want that airlines are running on such terrible margins that they can't have a backup plane. But do understand that this is not the fault of the maintenance personnel.
Who's blaming the maintenance personnel? I'm expecting the airlines to actually have their maintenance crews trained for the planes they fly.
I don't think this is a particularly unrealistic expectation.
Nor do I think the expectation that crews without enough training on a plane to tear its engine apart and put it back together not be tasked with something that will have them tearing the engine apart.
I don't need to understand how the maintenance works to expect it be done correctly for something that's going to be moving my ass at hundreds of miles per hour, thousands of feet in the air.
I don't blame the maintenance personnel for not giving themselves adequate training on the machines they'll be servicing; that's on the airlines to ensure they get that before telling them to work on those planes. I don't blame the maintenance personnel for being ordered to then work on planes they don't have training on.
And if "that's just how the industry is", that doesn't make it any better.
Either way, flying with an airline that runs basically one model and can ensure every maintenance person knows that plane and every pilot knows that plane seems a good way to avoid the issue, so I'll stick with what I've got for now, thanks.
Did it ever occur to you that they don't just have maintenance personnel at every airport? Because what I'm saying is that no airline in the world has maintenance personnel at every airport.
Spirit, Frontier and Allegiant are Airbus only and would require an Airbus tech. Airbus planes are pretty decent on that the A19-A321 planes are pretty much exactly the same in parts and configuration except that some are longer and or wider than others. On the other side of things Southwest has only Boeing planes, mostly 737 and 747.
Pretty much every other airline has a mix of different planes (Boeing, Airbus, and Bombardier, Embraer). To do what you're talking about every airline that flies more than one plane would have to have a technician for each of those plane types on the ground at every airport they fly to. That's 5000 airports, with at least two technicians per airport (assuming they only have one flight in and out of there at a time which is ludicrous). The average number of flights going in and out of any one airport at a time. Daily there are about 45,000 flights per day per FAA statistics not including private flights.
At Delta's hub in Atlanta, there are around 2100-2700 flights per day. Delta says they have about 6,400 AMT's worldwide One singular airport out of 242 airports that Delta flies to. 24 hours a day for most airports. They would be required to keep at least 8 people per airport per average number of flights leaving or arriving per at the same time. Let's say that at their hub they only have 5 planes on the ground at any given time ( a gross miscalculation of how many planes fly into their hub, but the math is cleaner). Delta has 4 different plane manufacturers's planes in their fleet. That's 4 mechanics on an 8 or 12 hour shift multiplied by 5 planes let's say per average turn around time of 30 minutes. You'd need 20 techs
At every single solitary airport Delta flies to. Per shift. Supplied by the airline. It's a logistical nightmare and this number balloons when you realise just how.many departures and arrivals there are and at what intervals at pretty much any major airport. 9,640 AMT's assuming 12 hour shifts. Just for domestic USA flights, not including planes that are down for maintenance outside regular maintenance schedule. When the fleet only emplyes 6,400 AMT's world wide.
I cannot stress this enough, but you're making a lot of assumptions here. And you don't think it's an unrealistic expectation specifically because you have no idea how any of this works.
Cool story.
I still fail to see how this makes it okay for techs to be told to tear apart an engine they weren't experienced with.
You can try to keep talking around how that's actually no big deal and I just don't get it. Totally your right. Just be aware that from my perspective you're trying to argue that it's acceptable to work on components without training that could cause a plane crash with people on board if it fails, and I just don't see how you can make that scenario okay, like, at all.
Because you don't understand what an A&P licensed Technician is or what the certification means. It also means you likely didn't understand what you were told about what was causing the delay.
By that I mean they probably initially had someone working on that plane who was new to being a tech. Which tracks because outside of recruiting from the military, a lot of AMT's recruited to the business are fresh out of highschool or college because that's when it's cheapest to hire them, and considering that older technicians are retiring every day. That technician was told there was a specific problem (let's say a fan cowl door won't latch). They open that door up to find that the reason it won't latch is because the latch is broken. To replace the latch they remove some parts, and then find that the reason it's broken is because some safety wire is broken off a bolt somewhere and wedged itself in such a way that it stressed that latch til it broke. Not only do they have to figure out where that safety wire came from, they have to do further teardown and inspection to make sure that there's no other damage. Unless you want to randomly lose an engine at 10k+ feet in the air where you can't pull over to the side of the road. And that's where being a subject matter expert on that particular model platform of plane would be preferred. Because while any AMT could find where that safety wire came from, not any AMT could do it on the Line without delaying a plane.
And that's why I said you were blaming Technicians. Because you were blaming Techs for the delay. Which in actuality was probably caused by something outside their control. Have a nice life dude. Your opinion is trash.
Yeah, no. I was very clear that I was not blaming the techs, but you go ahead, keep insisting on that.
I do not blame line workers for failings of management, which is exactly what I said I thought this was.
Maybe I am wrong here, wouldn't be the first time. If so, sorry for busting your chops like that. I've just seen too many businesses cutting corners and compromising safety to save a couple bucks, so maybe I'm overly jaded for this one. But the ire was NEVER directed at the techs.
United is still garbage and was miserable every time I flew with them, so regardless of the truth behind that incident I still stand by my decision to never fly with them again, and if that hadn't happened on that trip, the rest of the trip was enough to make me want nothing to do with them again.
Can I ask exactly what you expected them to do? The managers or gate staff or whoever?
I ask because delays when they happen are usually tied to federal regulations about who can fly, what can fly, in what condition, in what weather, etc. So if they found something to be mechanically wrong with your plane and not fixable in a way that is airworthy, generally that plane would be grounded and the airline would then have to scramble to find accommodation.
While I'll grant you that airlines overbook pretty much every plane in the event that people don't show up, and that's a scummy practice, I also fully understand that this decision was definitely not made by some.manager actively at the airport. This was a decision from the executive suite of the company.
I don't have good things to say about flying United, American, or Delta, even. I'm a bit biased about Southwest. But I haven't really had any problems with them. Believe it or not, same with Alaska despite the recent bad press.
I have been delayed many a time. I recognise that it can be devastatingly inconvenient and problematic. It can cost customers significant amounts of money and time.
I'm not saying it's unreasonable to be angry. I'm saying that the airport staff who likely would have related this information to you (pilot, flight attendants, gate staff) also aren't responsible. Further, the person who tasked that AMT or those AMT's to work on the plane you were on is likely doing their best to utilise staff efficiently and effectively to keep planes in the air because that's their job, and that job becomes exponentially harder when planes are grounded.
Your ire seems to be directed towards the airline at large, and it seems like you had an expectation of what would and should happen that I feel is unreasonable given what I know.
You haven't really made it clear what you expected except the things I have spoken to in previous comments in this thread. But even if you didn't mean it that way, what you basically said is that the AMT wasn't qualified (which isn't true) to be working on the model of plane that they were servicing, and that caused a delay. Which is why I said you were blaming the AMT. The fact that the manager of that AMT is also probably an AMT as well is something you seem to have glossed over.
The other thing I want to point out is that the cost of keeping planes on standby in the case of mechanical issues grounding a different plane would be astronomical, and that cost would probably triple or quadruple the cost of your plane ticket. At an airlines hub airport that might be feasible. But airport hangar space is limited and the run on costs of doing so are so cost prohibitive to most customers (not to mention the lack of AMT's available to make it happen), that I just don't understand what you expect a better result to look like.
We're not talking about shade tree mechanics on their garage tearing down an engine here. We're talking about highly trained AMT's who are part of a maintenance apparatus that is heavily heavily regulated by the federal government.
"oh no everyone has phones, nobody needs these shitty displays anymore should we remove them and replace them with a phone holder?"
"I have a better idea..."
Don't forget your trusty a4 and duct tape to plane.
The thing I hate is that all these airline screens usually default to "on", and people tend to leave defaults. I'm a tall person, and can usually see a large number of the screens in front of me. So if I'm on a night flight, even if I don't intend to sleep, the only way to not be blinded by dozens of ads for a few hours is to bring a sleep mask.
I feel so bad for tall people on planes. It's uncomfortable AF for all of us, but you guys have to become human origami just to sit. It's insane that this shit is legal. I avoid flying as much as possible.
It's uncomfortable AF for all of us
Idk, I'm pretty comfortable on planes, and I'm around 5'8 lol
Also, ths taller you are, the more likely you are to be seriously injured in severe turbulence, malfunctions, minor crashes and major crashes.
I'm tall and fat it's a double whammy. Granted one I've done to myself, luckily I generally only fly with my wife so I can get the isle seat to stretch
They also automatically turn the screens back on repeatedly after you turn them off.
I use a baseball cap pulled down. Works well for me
Airline passengers should have confidence that their personal information is not being shared improperly with third parties [...]
So they are only shared properly with third parties? Great!
I already dislike the experience of being with other passengers on United. Nothing negative occurred on my part, just noticed how badly behaved other passengers were compared to every other airline I’ve flown.
My point is, I wouldn’t pick United to fly as my first choice.
Have you ever flown on a Frontier or Spirit flight?
No
You would think otherwise by your username.
Can't wait to see adds for prostate exams or erectile malfunction on a plane when I get older.
Psssshhhhh, you won't see them. It's a 3 hour plane ride where you have no responsibilities, surrounded by people that by this point in the day you already can't stand.
At that age, you're telling me you WON'T fall asleep???
"At that age"
Buddy, how old do you think people are when they're supposed to start checking for prostate cancer?
Just a few hours away from returning back to the dirt in the ground surely?
On their deathbed, a man shows up to deliver strong pentrative action to a geriatric patient.
Ya know, send em' out with a bang.
I don't know about prostate cancer, but I do know that apperently I waited too long to check for colon cancer. Just spent a year recovering, and I'm only 40. It was probably there already for a number of years.
So, start getting screened when you're 5 years old, I guess.....
I wear a sleep mask on flights and once my IEMs go in they don’t come out until we’re about to land. In short, I don’t see or hear shit.
So... How long before tape and blank paper are banned on planes?
I Vaguely recall that in the dystopian world depicted in the Max Headroom TV series it was illegal to turn off TVs. It felt bonkers to me when I was a kid, but now it doesn't seem too far off.
And I'm sure this in no way will invade people's privacy.
"Hmm, why is the anti-queer politician sitting next to me being served dozens of male underwear ads? Hmmmm..."
"Why is my daughter receiving ads for newborn diapers? Hmmm..."
"Why is my neighbor receiving ads for anger management? Hmmm..."
Why is my neighbor receiving ads for anger management?
He probably gets aggressive when seeing too many ads
Nothing a bit of paper/cardboard and a strip of tape can't fix.
Where's my duct tape and mini tool
Years ago I was on a flight where you couldn't turn this screen off. You could turn off the programming, but the screen still glowed. I discovered that if you take an advertisement from the back pocket and fold it, it can be inserted perfectly into the cracks around the screen and block it completely. Use the ads to block the ads.
Can I pull a boomer move and keep touching the screen repeatedly harder even though it's not a touch screen??? I MUST HAVE THIS, WHY IS IPAD NOT WORKING?!!!!!!!!
Yes, please! Keep pushing on the screen harder and harder until it breaks. Then do it on the screen next to you.
I must eat Cheetos or Doritos for Max effectiveness
Flight attendant: "Why are these screens pushed in and stained orange?"
Where's my high-powered magnet?
I'm sure there's something I can do to discreetly fuck up that screen.
A packet of printable stick-on shipping labels is like 5 bucks. 10 seconds to apply, probable never removable without damaging the screen.
Or those nice warranty stickers which disintegrate when peeling off
"weird, yeah I got here and this screen just had all this sharpie over it, i dunno how it happened"
A very sticky sticker will do a better job
Good luck with that. I’m gonna turn that bitch off one way or another.
Preferably "accidentally" damaging the screen
i read the article and it didn't seem to state. how will they target me? using the personal info I'm required to give them to book my flight? the origin and destinations and seat location? these are entirely different kinds of metrics. one is far more invasive. and is it tying into larger models they've purchased from like google or something? this is stupid and i hate it.
Until proven otherwise, I'd assume the worst. They know your identity to travel, and they link it with profiles from all the major ad networks.
I think you're spot on. In addition to needing to hand over your passport or state ID, your credit card, your email and phone number, what else would they need to target you?
Imagine if you're using your airline branded credit card to get free miles or a seat upgrade and they know all your purchase history.
Does united use the same in flight entertainment system as Delta? If united does they are probably tracking you using the facial detection camera on the seats.
I highly doubt that, the compute on these tablets is straight trash.
That is a proximity sensor. It allows the touch buttons on the bezel to light up when your hand approaches
Could be monitoring in flight wifi. I have no idea.
Nothing that some Self Adhesive Vinyl can't fix. They'll have to deal with getting it off the screen afterwards too. Want to fine me for it? Then tell me where you got the data, because I didn't consent to you having my data.
You probably did/do consent at some point, but nobody reads the fine print.
Calling into United:
Hey I see you charged me $400 for a replacement screen? Tell me, where did you buy the targeted ad data you used to display ads on that screen? Oh, an agency that I signed terms and conditions for at some point? Shit, alright then.
I mean, fuck United tho and they will not be getting and damn money from me.
You bought the ticket right?
While in the EU or California, what ever works better...
The little guy always wins!
In david and goliath, david won. In the tortoise and the hare, the tortoise won. Rey Mysterio vs the 2006 Royal Rumble, Rey Mysterio won.
Hmmmm, you may be onto something!
That's what I'm saying! And I'm sure we could make up dozens more stories too.
Time for me to whip out my trusty old Black Sheet'o'Paper and masking tape....
Can you turn the screens off? I haven't flown in 5 years, but I just watched stuff off of my tablet instead.
In my experience yes, but some planes ive notice they turn back on each time there is an announcement, so depending on how many it can be annoying. Eother way advertising is a cancer that plagues our lives more and more.
You can, but I've stopped ever using them because the screen completely stops for every. Single. Announcement.
And now you can have your phone out for take off and landings, so yea no thanks I'll stick with my device that keeps working when they're making some random announcement about drinks or some shit
If you still can, they'll find ways to disable the option to turn them off, because it's time you don't watch an ad.
TRAAAAAIIIIIIIINS.
I wish I had train options where I live
I've heard they are great to cross oceans.
Distance between mainland Eurasia and mainland North America is 86 km. But you will have to use 1520 mm gauge.
It is a matter of time before they figure out how to do targeted ads in dreams.
If they do that, I will laser the optics off soviet early warning satellites and start thevnuclear holocaust. I think everyone would like that !
I'm sure they'll have an option where you can pay for them to go away ....
Basic economy will eventually only let you select any ad in their library. Actual content is for regular economy passengers only!
Cunts
I wonder how long it will be before they start giving discounts on tickets for interacting with the ads a certain number of times during the flight.
Never. The whole ad craze is there to milk profits on top of the things you already paid for.
What you are suggesting would actually be a more fair system.
Free with ads or paid with no ads.
Asshole corporations want paid and ads.
The Ad Algorithm
It knows when you are sleeping
It knows when you're awake
It knows when you've been bad or good
So consume for goodness sake
Fuck this.
nodding off? time for a bright ad with super saturation and lots of brightness variability, they'll strobe you into paying attention.
how much do you have to pay to turn the fucking thing off?
Oh look, yet another reason why not to fly anymore!
Airlines in America really suck, I feel like we have much better options here in Europe
Yup.
My last flight a year ago was so bad I'm just going to drive from now on. I don't care if I have to take an extra day of PTO.
They do and I won't argue that point. It would fly in the face of everything I have seen. Multiple times I have flown on planes based in 3rd world countries to other 3rd world countries and each and every time it was a more pleasant experience than flying domestic in the US. I mean the whole thing. From being dropped off to the airport, to security, to food in the airport, to the comfort levels of the chairs, to the amount of leg room. All of it was better, all of it.
Plus our border is terrible as well. Last year took my family abroad and when we got back to the US my six year old put her little backpack on the scanner too quickly for the Border Guard liking. So the big manly tough guy screamed at my six year old. She proceeded to cry. I wanted to sock him across the face but not as much as I want to avoid a 20 year prison sentence. Next time I will go all Karen and write a letter to go in his file with his badge number. It will make me feel better but fix nothing.
i will be taping cardboard over the screen
Omg genius. What about the other hundred of screens of passengers around you?
so bring extra... noted.
Wireless ad blockers 5$ each
And for the low, low price of $4,99 you will get not one, not two but three ad blocking devices you can use to stop these ads from bothering you! Available in several cute patterns and colors. Get yours now, call now!
(warning: do not wash these cloths above 105°F or there might be ad-spillage while using the ad blocker due to shrinkage)
Airline CEOs doing their damnedest to out-fumble eachother.
It's truly amazing....they must stand at the front of meetings and just ask "how do we make our passengers hate us most?"
Maybe I don't understand the economics of this move, but are they really going to make that much more money from targeted ads? If it's double the price, I assume it's worth it, but if it's a ~10% gain it's just dumb.
Numbers must go up at all costs. By the time the company's reputation hit rock bottom, the CEO already jumped ship to the next company.
Me, an italian, i see an underdevelopped species of "coffe" inside a soap dispender and die inside
Most people will be too busy with their laptops, tablets, and phones to pay any attention to whatever ads they put on those screens.
So it’s okay then.
It certainly wouldn't be OK for anyone that actually wants to use the in flight entertainment. I watch whatever TV shows and movies that I downloaded ad free and never turn on the seat back screens.
Finally I won't miss a moment of pornhub.
Man, we should break more stuff.
Are the ads selling life insurance?
Not if the flight is a Boeing.
edit: how to embedd youtube videos?
embedding arbitrary things was disabled a while back due to security reasons. Just link it
I don't want to click the news and give more data for capitalists. Where summary?
The "article" is like 100 words and just restates the title in more words.
Maybe the only information it adds is that they won't target passengers under 18
For those of you contemplating ways of covering up the ads:
This is the same airline that beat the shit out of that doctor because the airline overbooked the flight. For your own safety, do not cross this airline.
The Chicago Department of Aviation did that. The same way if the police ends up killing someone, it was not the person calling the police.
United was booting passengers to make room for employee transfers though, the situation was shit before dept of aviation even got the call.
Those employees could have stood. Frontier and Spirit give vouchers out when they intentionally overbook.......which before the pandemic was everyday. If nobody takes the bait, they up the voucher value. For them it's essentially monopoly money.
If United couldn't get anybody to bite at the vouchers, then the employees should have stood the whole flight. Instead, they beat a man who was not fighting back physically. He only insisted that he get to his patient. They LITERALLY dragged him off the plane. By his ankle, as he tried to grab onto anything he could.
Yeah, that is not a solution. The FAA is salivating at the thought of this. Everyone must have a seat for takeoff and landing.
That’s not how FAA regs work. There is no such thing as standing room on a plane.
Sure, but telling someone to leave their plane for some oddball reason is "only bad" not outright crazy like what happened then.
That seems incredibly stupid. A doctor can afford to sue.
he wasn't white, so they didn't assume he was a doctor
i think we should make them afraid to cross us
I got screeched at for covering up a super bright blinking light on a red eye. Their FAs are next level stupid.
They did what?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_United_Express_passenger_removal
Made me laugh, that's putting it lightly..
They mishandled the shit out of him.
Just a typo.
Holy shit what a ride that was.
It's clear from a lot of stories like this (severe customer mistreatment) that United employees are miserable people who hate their jobs but this is nuts. I hope Dr. Dao got a huge settlement from United.
Is United Express actually United? I thought those tended to be a regional carrier using the name under license.
I'd expect the labour friction to be still worse; I was peripherally involved with such a firm 20 years ago and know they had terrible problems with staff retention, mostly because they wouldn't pay enough to retain people after they got fed up with the free-standby-flight privileges.
United is Four Seasons compared to American.
Wow. Even Trump thought they went too far. Damn.
And the CEO who brushed that assault off ‘suffered’ a ‘delayed promotion’. Poor thing. For saying that stuff about anyone, let alone a customer, he should have been fired, no golden parachute.
I think the doctor’s patients should have sued the airline too, since no doubt having their doctor pounded to a pulp caused them to miss their appointments.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dk2Y_VL5e7s
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=Dk2Y_VL5e7s
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Overbooking should be a mandatory minimum compensation of the greater of 1000x the ticket price or $20k. It's a truly fucked up practice to disrespect people's time like that.
Oh, we'll just refund you the cost of the ticket. That was the whole cost, right?
And they break guitars
https://youtu.be/5YGc4zOqozo?si=22AVoZsoS9Celac6
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/5YGc4zOqozo?si=22AVoZsoS9Celac6
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Dude, you can just turn the screen off. Its OK.
Please enter your credit card to disable ads
Screens don’t hit back
It's a contactless carrier, they already have my card on file.
"If you don't like it don't fly"
Seriously just shut up.
Edit: LMAO just saw your other comment where you actually said this sincerely. You're a parody of yourself.
Comedy is an art form. You need to commit to the joke.
Have you ever turned a screen off on one of these planes? They turn back on. So you turn them off again. Sooner or later, they turn back on. And repeat.
Worse, you will be surrounded by them on all sides, as others don't bother... :-(
I have. It usually stays off until they rig the cabin for final approach. Comes back on for landing but hey, whatever?
I'm getting beaten up for my stance here, but seriously: if all it takes to put you over is some midflight ads the do the rest of us a favor and don't fly. Take a train or whatever.
Y'all are acting like they're gonna strap us down and tape our eyes open like that Alex Whasisname kid in A Clockwork Orange. I assure you that doesn't happen for another 22 years in this timeline (give or take).
People like you constantly give corporations an inch because "it's not a big deal" and here we are.
Hot take. Tell me more about me?
I saw you eat food dropped in a toilet.
I don't think you're being beaten up for it. I certainly am not beating you up for it. But usually, yeah, the screen does come back on during the flight. I think they turn it back on automatically every time there's an announcement. As somebody who finds screens like that very distracting and even migraine-inducing (the "busyness" of that sort of thing is a big trigger), it's really frustrating.
Where can I book a train to Europe?
Depends on the plane and system it has. Last United flight I was on it stayed off the entire flight. I use my phone and generally don’t look at it anyway but it was nicer I suppose.
Let's have you build a train line to Europe eh?
I honestly couldn't care less how many adverts they show me, they can have a constant stream of adverts the whole flight if it means that some shitty corporation is paying a portion of my travel coats.
People really need to grow up about stuff like this, if you don't want adverts then pay for a premium service - I'm poor, I'll accept the adverts.
That money isn't subsidizing your flight cost, it's increasing corporate profits.
Here's the thing: companies have learned they can add ads to make additional money without passing any of that on to their customers.
If you think you're going to get a better rate for having ads, you're fooling yourself. They'll always charge as much as they can get people to pay and that amount isn't affected by ads most of the time.
This is thinking based on emotion not reality, most of the internet is free because of adverts so your belief that it's not used to lower prices is clearly silly. Yes companies love profit but they often increase profits by lowering prices to attract more business, it's a perfectly valid business model to use adverts to reduce the cost to the customer and increase customer volume.
No, you can't.
You can if you’re a Party member
You can, there's a button combo. It changes sometimes but if you spam a few things I can always black it out
But that's not the point, it still sucks
This should count as violation of human rights. You're chained to the seat for hours and have no other option than look at this screen or force your eyes closed. Holy shit, people should get really mad. Flashing ads on a screen you don't look at directly are still very annoying, even if you look on your phone.
I need to start a business selling rectangular shaped covers for these displays. I’ll even make one that serves as a holder for an iPad, so you can substitute your own screen.
I fold the flight safety manual and hang it over the screen with a tab, inserted into the folding gap above the screen.
This guy Uniteds
Duct tape
Make them magnetically attach to the screen.
You can turn off the TV dude
In my experience, that's only temporary. The screen will always wake up again on United flights.
I wasn't aware they glued your eyelids and head directly facing the screen
Found the boot licker
You can literally not watch things if you don't want to.
Read a book.
🥾👅
Boot licking is when you are not easily distracted by shiny lights.
It's when you suck oligarch cock
Y'all behave like they put a gun up to your head and force you to watch them ads lmao.
It's mental how the simple thought of maybe do something else than watch the ads is met with such hostility lmao.
You know what doesn't have ads (yet, anyway)? Mother fucking books.
You know what you can take on a plane with you? A mother fucking book.
Read a book.
You when billion dollar companies want to literally shove more ads in your face:
You when the 57th ad in a row plays on tv.
I am just so, so tired of being constantly inundated with being told to CONSUME.
What else would you like to do? seize the means of production?
Yeah, but no one wants to join my radical anti-government militia.
Well, they do, but I'm in TN so it's for the wrong reasons.
If you're in a plane, you deserve it.
thanks, I'll just abandon my family
Shouldn't be that far away from them in the first place if you actually cared.
This is fucking hilarious. Do you know that sometimes, people go elsewhere for economic opportunities? Then they bring their children after they get settled in?
Sometimes they go back, and leave the children there.
Do you think those kids should be stranded?
I don't care lol.
Work where you live, it's not that hard.
sometimes people don't want to live in the middle of nowhere forever. not many engineering jobs there. we all want economic mobility too
The ultimate quest for wealth is worth destroying the planet.
Also vast majority of people take planes for leisure, I'm sure we can deal without them. People used to travel the world in sail boats and they still managed to get where they wanted to go.
I don't think you understand - I can live poor and destitute without a job in my hometown, or leave to find work somewhere else. This is the reality of many Americans in rural America.
This isn't a quest for "wealth", it's a quest for life
Aw, port little american, need to pollute more in order to go and earn more money
A) to go and earn any money B) I actually pollute less in the place that I moved to since I don't have to drive a car
Sure sure, whatever helps you justify the fact you're in a plane instead of using greener travel methods.
Lmao, it's cute how you think you have some moral/ethical high ground here. Wouldn't be at all surprised if you have this view because no one would want you around no matter where you happened to be. Run along little troll.
I don't need to fly a plane to find people who like me :)
Careful, your ignorance is showing
Can it ever just stop?
We tried that in the 80s already. Here's how it went down.
1980s comes along, and people had been seeing commercials on tv for years. So along comes this new concept. Now you can PAY to watch tv.....without ads. GREAT!
So people started paying for this new "cable tv". Then the cable operators were like "I know they're paying to not see ads......but what if we STILL showed ads, and STILL took their money????"
So that happened.
Then after some decades Netflix came around, originally with liscensed tv shows from all over tv.......except now you could PAY to watch them, without the ads. And then they drastically lost their liscensed content, and produced their own original content.
After a few decades, Netflix said "I know they're paying not to see commercials.......but what if we STARTED showing commercials, AND raised prices every few months."
Man, I can't wait for the next guy to charge me money to not see ads. Only to inevitably show me ads a few years later....
I do look forward to the next generation of ad free media consumption powered by a small VC startup fund that has a bunch of low cost fresh-out-of-university students paid mostly in stocks working in a garage to say "yeah fuck this I've seen ads all my life in gonna do make something that doesn't make people hate life"
Each iteration of the technology eventually becomes hot garbage. But man, for like a decade there shit is pretty good while the rest of the entrenched industry is stuck trying to pay lobbyists to get law makers to write rules that neither side understands just to have them ultimately not get passed or not address the issue and those companies still disappear.
What if I were to buy back all my own DVDs and watch them? Would I need to voluntarily show myself ads later?
Don’t worry the TV you are watching it on got you covered. https://eu.community.samsung.com/t5/tv/how-to-exit-samsung-tv-plus-fix-how-to-disable-samsung-ads-fix/td-p/9352840
Targeted, individualized, advertising should be illegal. This will gut a lot of the motivations for the privacy invasions and data harvesting. This is how advertising worked for thousands of years. I think it could continue to be just fine.
The amount of resources humanity is spending on targeted advertising is extremely depressing when you consider the opportunity cost. There are thousands of engineers and product managers that spend all day on this stuff instead of anything useful.
This is an interesting idea!
So I am going to sit down and the screen will be full of penis enlargement pills? What will all the hot singles in the area think?
You'll be in a new city by supper. Who cares what they think?
If you're getting targeted ads for penis enlargement pills, then the system thinks you have a small pp. If this is an error, you should submit photographic evidence to their office to prove you don't have a small pp.
Insert penis here
I, for one, can't wait to have my personal info proudly displayed to whatever randos they seat next to me! /s
fuck with the algorithm make it show ads for porno and then they'll stop doing it
I assume they won't allow porns in ads, but you can still get worse stuff than porn, like erectile dysfunction medication ads which causes people around your seat to look at you with sorry eyes.
Yeah, this is going to be hell for flight attendants having to deal with rightfully upset passengers.
Or just corrupt it till its weird ass surreal local ads. May take some work though.
Classic late stage capitalism, where humans' sole reason for existence is being advertised to. Soon we'll start putting ads in incubators too, and invalidate this Onion article: https://www.theonion.com/17-days-in-incubator-longest-time-premature-baby-will-g-1851456014
About a decade ago Fox News got brought to court, and had to defend themselves against the idea that their content wasn't actually factually accurate most of the time. Therefore not "news".
Fox responded by saying that their program wasn't meant to be news. I forget the exact quote, I'm sure duckduckgo is your friend, but it was along the lines of "No reasonable person would ever consume Fox News content and believe it to be trustworthy accurate news. It is an opinionated entertainment show about the news."
I don't remember their tagline at the time, but it was something along the lines of "Fox News is your only outlet for unbiased news!" Something to that effect. I just remember Jon Stewart calling out the hypocrasy of their tagline being the exact opposite of what they said in court.
If Fox News is entertainment meant to push the agenda that the right is right, and if CNN is entertainment meant to push the agenda that the left is right, then I don't see why The Onion can't join them as entertainment meant to push the agenda that the whole world is fucking stupid.
Still operating as a "real news source", except it's all bullshit like Fox News and CNN. Just entertainment.
Same thing happened with "VitaminWater", a product in the category of "enhanced water" (a term reminiscent of "enhanced interrogation technique"). Coca-Cola argued that, despite the name, no reasonable person would believe it's actually healthy. They settled.
More to consider when selecting an airline. Greedy fuckers, I hope their stock takes a nosedive thanks to this
It'll probably take a small dip and then rise quite a bit once profits from implementing it start rolling in
‘Capitalism breeds innovation’
The innovation
Seriously. It's nearly a sure thing. I should buy on Monday and see how it goes. People are sleepwalking about adtech shit so they'll continue to fly United. There's already a dude in this thread telling people to chill and just don't fly if they don't like it. The ad revenue should be pretty juicy, too. They have a bored captive audience identified by full name and credit card number.
And if it succesful, or at least passenger doesn't boycott them over it, it is just a question of time until other airlines adds it as well
Part of the problem is that UA is such a massive airline, odds are any alternatives would involve quite a bit of sacrifice. Not many people would be willing or can afford to take an extra 2 layovers or 50%+ extra travel time or cost in order to get to where they want to go 🫤 That's not to say I won't try my best to avoid UA though, I was already sick of them after my last trip and now I find this news.
What's the ROI on ads anyway? I feel like ads are just a way to funnel money between corps. People who are forced to see ads are really not even the point anymore. This is like corporations subsidizing other corporations. Don't even matter that you buy that item being shown to you.
I always wondered this too.
Found a website saying Youtube adviews are $100-300 per 10k (ad views, not video views). That's 1-3¢ per view. If we assume an ad is 10seconds, then your time is worth 0.1-0.3¢ per second, or $3.60-10.80 per hour.
An A380 looks to be 380-615 seats. I'd imagine they're more often optimising for space, so let's say 550.
Long haul flight, 10% of people at any time using inflight stuff, 8 hours, 4 ads per hour = 5500.18*4 ads watched. 1760 ads. There will be a massive premium for planes, but surely only one order of magnitude more (e.g. 10x). That's equivalent to give or take 20k YouTube adviews which would be $200-600 per flight.
There are a lot of planes in the sky every single day though....
The thing is, it's only a ROI if any of those passengers converts to a buyer. The act of seeing an ad creates no value for the manufacturer unless they are converted to a buyer. What you are describing is a market that has the consumer (ad watcher) almost completely removed from the conversion of capital. Being forced to watch an ad, in this case, only benefits the airline by their receiving ad revenue. The passengers are nearly supflourous.
ROI from adverts is always a shitshow though. If you come off a plane and see and buy it, is it because you just saw an advert for it, or were you always going to buy it. There is of course stats that may show number of impressions vs. total purchases trend, but its still just massive correlation that I imagine there is a bunch of people pulling spreadsheets together to justify their marketing spend. Anecdotally, I've heard of data teams working with marketing teams and just going "whelp, whatever you need to justify your job", etc.
Real ROI via direct sales though, that's somewhat measurable since you have a direct cost of acquisition (sales person salary, overheads, etc) vs revenue.
Including the opt out link in the announcement article is a good guy move on the writer's part. Thanks, Kate. You're a pal.
I requested opt out and they requested my ID. lol! So they’re demanding more info to opt out of info collection.
How are they going to identify who is opting out without being able to match it to the person in the seat..?
Your united data is going to be tied to an email. They could just use that. It's reasonable to see this as further invasiveness, similar to Meta™ account recovery.
Email validation.
Say you're from California on the form and it'll change what you have to enter. You don't have to put in an address or verify CA residency.
That’s what I did. It says they’ll be following up to get ID.
Weird, I didn't see that. fingers crossed it's a bluff lol
“I’m sorry ma'am but could you please remove your jacket from the seat? It’s obstructing the ads and we have a very clear policy about that”
🙃
They could come up with some bullshit like, obstructing your screen is interfering with the display of critical airplane safety information or something.
To begin the flight, please drink Mountain Dew Verification Can.
Verification Can Invalid. Please drink Mountain Dew Verification Can.
ERROR! Passenger attempting to steal Premium Ad-less Flying Option! Adding your name to the No Fly List and automatically deducting penalty fee from your credit card.
ERROR! Credit Card Declined! Alerting TSA! Alerting FBI! Alerting Sky Marshals!
Remember when the assholes at United overbooked a flight and sent someone to knock a doctor's teeth out and carry him off a plane? The doctor refused since he was on his way to oversee the opening of a clinic he founded for veterans.
Fuck United Airlines.
https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/news/story/doctor-dragged-off-united-airlines-flight-watching-viral-62250271
United will kill your dog, bust up your guitar, and knock down and drag out your doctor. They've made the headlines for all three of those. And the guitar guy made a song about United.
Unfortunately, the other airlines aren't much better.
This just confirms my decision to never fly United again
Their seats did that for me. I'm 5'11", not a giant, and my knees were straight up jammed into the seat in front of me. Completely insane that they're even legally allowed to sell those to people as seats. They might fit a child.
What did it for me was a long delay that got me landed at my destination after car rental was closed
Not so much the delay itself; that upset me, but I get that things happen
It was the reason for the delay: a simple maintenance thing with the plane had them taking the engine further and further apart while we watched from the terminal, ultimately deciding they weren't getting this thing back up and running again anytime soon and having to get us another plane (which we had to wait for to fly to us)
Why couldn't they figure it out? Because they didn't have anyone who knew how to work on that plane model available
There are so many ways that pisses me off and makes me never want to trust them again
Also, every flight I had with them, including the return trip that I'd already booked from that trip, was miserable
Say what you will about Southwest but they know their damned planes inside and out and overall run their fleet efficiently and consistently. It's like riding a bus that flies
I've reluctantly come to the same conclusion.
The median age for an A&P licensed plane tech is 55. We'll welcome you to the ranks anytime.
I have no idea what it is you're trying to say here or how it relates to an airline running planes without having maintenance crews that can actually do the work on them... And that they worked on it anyway without apparently having the required training for it...
This comment directly speaks to your lack of understanding of how airline maintenance works. The point though is there are a shortage of maintenance personnel in the industry. People are retiring all the time and nobody is filling those billets once they leave. And airlines don't just have a maintenance crew at every airport because there's not enough, and it wouldn't be cost effective. Be as angry as you want that airlines are running on such terrible margins that they can't have a backup plane. But do understand that this is not the fault of the maintenance personnel.
Who's blaming the maintenance personnel? I'm expecting the airlines to actually have their maintenance crews trained for the planes they fly.
I don't think this is a particularly unrealistic expectation.
Nor do I think the expectation that crews without enough training on a plane to tear its engine apart and put it back together not be tasked with something that will have them tearing the engine apart.
I don't need to understand how the maintenance works to expect it be done correctly for something that's going to be moving my ass at hundreds of miles per hour, thousands of feet in the air.
I don't blame the maintenance personnel for not giving themselves adequate training on the machines they'll be servicing; that's on the airlines to ensure they get that before telling them to work on those planes. I don't blame the maintenance personnel for being ordered to then work on planes they don't have training on.
And if "that's just how the industry is", that doesn't make it any better.
Either way, flying with an airline that runs basically one model and can ensure every maintenance person knows that plane and every pilot knows that plane seems a good way to avoid the issue, so I'll stick with what I've got for now, thanks.
Did it ever occur to you that they don't just have maintenance personnel at every airport? Because what I'm saying is that no airline in the world has maintenance personnel at every airport.
Spirit, Frontier and Allegiant are Airbus only and would require an Airbus tech. Airbus planes are pretty decent on that the A19-A321 planes are pretty much exactly the same in parts and configuration except that some are longer and or wider than others. On the other side of things Southwest has only Boeing planes, mostly 737 and 747.
Pretty much every other airline has a mix of different planes (Boeing, Airbus, and Bombardier, Embraer). To do what you're talking about every airline that flies more than one plane would have to have a technician for each of those plane types on the ground at every airport they fly to. That's 5000 airports, with at least two technicians per airport (assuming they only have one flight in and out of there at a time which is ludicrous). The average number of flights going in and out of any one airport at a time. Daily there are about 45,000 flights per day per FAA statistics not including private flights.
At Delta's hub in Atlanta, there are around 2100-2700 flights per day. Delta says they have about 6,400 AMT's worldwide One singular airport out of 242 airports that Delta flies to. 24 hours a day for most airports. They would be required to keep at least 8 people per airport per average number of flights leaving or arriving per at the same time. Let's say that at their hub they only have 5 planes on the ground at any given time ( a gross miscalculation of how many planes fly into their hub, but the math is cleaner). Delta has 4 different plane manufacturers's planes in their fleet. That's 4 mechanics on an 8 or 12 hour shift multiplied by 5 planes let's say per average turn around time of 30 minutes. You'd need 20 techs At every single solitary airport Delta flies to. Per shift. Supplied by the airline. It's a logistical nightmare and this number balloons when you realise just how.many departures and arrivals there are and at what intervals at pretty much any major airport. 9,640 AMT's assuming 12 hour shifts. Just for domestic USA flights, not including planes that are down for maintenance outside regular maintenance schedule. When the fleet only emplyes 6,400 AMT's world wide.
I cannot stress this enough, but you're making a lot of assumptions here. And you don't think it's an unrealistic expectation specifically because you have no idea how any of this works.
Cool story.
I still fail to see how this makes it okay for techs to be told to tear apart an engine they weren't experienced with.
You can try to keep talking around how that's actually no big deal and I just don't get it. Totally your right. Just be aware that from my perspective you're trying to argue that it's acceptable to work on components without training that could cause a plane crash with people on board if it fails, and I just don't see how you can make that scenario okay, like, at all.
Because you don't understand what an A&P licensed Technician is or what the certification means. It also means you likely didn't understand what you were told about what was causing the delay.
By that I mean they probably initially had someone working on that plane who was new to being a tech. Which tracks because outside of recruiting from the military, a lot of AMT's recruited to the business are fresh out of highschool or college because that's when it's cheapest to hire them, and considering that older technicians are retiring every day. That technician was told there was a specific problem (let's say a fan cowl door won't latch). They open that door up to find that the reason it won't latch is because the latch is broken. To replace the latch they remove some parts, and then find that the reason it's broken is because some safety wire is broken off a bolt somewhere and wedged itself in such a way that it stressed that latch til it broke. Not only do they have to figure out where that safety wire came from, they have to do further teardown and inspection to make sure that there's no other damage. Unless you want to randomly lose an engine at 10k+ feet in the air where you can't pull over to the side of the road. And that's where being a subject matter expert on that particular model platform of plane would be preferred. Because while any AMT could find where that safety wire came from, not any AMT could do it on the Line without delaying a plane.
And that's why I said you were blaming Technicians. Because you were blaming Techs for the delay. Which in actuality was probably caused by something outside their control. Have a nice life dude. Your opinion is trash.
Yeah, no. I was very clear that I was not blaming the techs, but you go ahead, keep insisting on that.
I do not blame line workers for failings of management, which is exactly what I said I thought this was.
Maybe I am wrong here, wouldn't be the first time. If so, sorry for busting your chops like that. I've just seen too many businesses cutting corners and compromising safety to save a couple bucks, so maybe I'm overly jaded for this one. But the ire was NEVER directed at the techs.
United is still garbage and was miserable every time I flew with them, so regardless of the truth behind that incident I still stand by my decision to never fly with them again, and if that hadn't happened on that trip, the rest of the trip was enough to make me want nothing to do with them again.
Can I ask exactly what you expected them to do? The managers or gate staff or whoever?
I ask because delays when they happen are usually tied to federal regulations about who can fly, what can fly, in what condition, in what weather, etc. So if they found something to be mechanically wrong with your plane and not fixable in a way that is airworthy, generally that plane would be grounded and the airline would then have to scramble to find accommodation.
While I'll grant you that airlines overbook pretty much every plane in the event that people don't show up, and that's a scummy practice, I also fully understand that this decision was definitely not made by some.manager actively at the airport. This was a decision from the executive suite of the company.
I don't have good things to say about flying United, American, or Delta, even. I'm a bit biased about Southwest. But I haven't really had any problems with them. Believe it or not, same with Alaska despite the recent bad press.
I have been delayed many a time. I recognise that it can be devastatingly inconvenient and problematic. It can cost customers significant amounts of money and time.
I'm not saying it's unreasonable to be angry. I'm saying that the airport staff who likely would have related this information to you (pilot, flight attendants, gate staff) also aren't responsible. Further, the person who tasked that AMT or those AMT's to work on the plane you were on is likely doing their best to utilise staff efficiently and effectively to keep planes in the air because that's their job, and that job becomes exponentially harder when planes are grounded.
Your ire seems to be directed towards the airline at large, and it seems like you had an expectation of what would and should happen that I feel is unreasonable given what I know.
You haven't really made it clear what you expected except the things I have spoken to in previous comments in this thread. But even if you didn't mean it that way, what you basically said is that the AMT wasn't qualified (which isn't true) to be working on the model of plane that they were servicing, and that caused a delay. Which is why I said you were blaming the AMT. The fact that the manager of that AMT is also probably an AMT as well is something you seem to have glossed over.
The other thing I want to point out is that the cost of keeping planes on standby in the case of mechanical issues grounding a different plane would be astronomical, and that cost would probably triple or quadruple the cost of your plane ticket. At an airlines hub airport that might be feasible. But airport hangar space is limited and the run on costs of doing so are so cost prohibitive to most customers (not to mention the lack of AMT's available to make it happen), that I just don't understand what you expect a better result to look like.
We're not talking about shade tree mechanics on their garage tearing down an engine here. We're talking about highly trained AMT's who are part of a maintenance apparatus that is heavily heavily regulated by the federal government.
But now you can silently judge your neighbors for the ads they are seeing.
Or be jealous.
"oh no everyone has phones, nobody needs these shitty displays anymore should we remove them and replace them with a phone holder?"
"I have a better idea..."
Don't forget your trusty a4 and duct tape to plane.
The thing I hate is that all these airline screens usually default to "on", and people tend to leave defaults. I'm a tall person, and can usually see a large number of the screens in front of me. So if I'm on a night flight, even if I don't intend to sleep, the only way to not be blinded by dozens of ads for a few hours is to bring a sleep mask.
I feel so bad for tall people on planes. It's uncomfortable AF for all of us, but you guys have to become human origami just to sit. It's insane that this shit is legal. I avoid flying as much as possible.
Idk, I'm pretty comfortable on planes, and I'm around 5'8 lol
Also, ths taller you are, the more likely you are to be seriously injured in severe turbulence, malfunctions, minor crashes and major crashes.
I'm tall and fat it's a double whammy. Granted one I've done to myself, luckily I generally only fly with my wife so I can get the isle seat to stretch
They also automatically turn the screens back on repeatedly after you turn them off.
I use a baseball cap pulled down. Works well for me
So they are only shared properly with third parties? Great!
I already dislike the experience of being with other passengers on United. Nothing negative occurred on my part, just noticed how badly behaved other passengers were compared to every other airline I’ve flown.
My point is, I wouldn’t pick United to fly as my first choice.
Have you ever flown on a Frontier or Spirit flight?
No
You would think otherwise by your username.
Can't wait to see adds for prostate exams or erectile malfunction on a plane when I get older.
Psssshhhhh, you won't see them. It's a 3 hour plane ride where you have no responsibilities, surrounded by people that by this point in the day you already can't stand.
At that age, you're telling me you WON'T fall asleep???
"At that age"
Buddy, how old do you think people are when they're supposed to start checking for prostate cancer?
Just a few hours away from returning back to the dirt in the ground surely?
On their deathbed, a man shows up to deliver strong pentrative action to a geriatric patient.
Ya know, send em' out with a bang.
I don't know about prostate cancer, but I do know that apperently I waited too long to check for colon cancer. Just spent a year recovering, and I'm only 40. It was probably there already for a number of years.
So, start getting screened when you're 5 years old, I guess.....
I wear a sleep mask on flights and once my IEMs go in they don’t come out until we’re about to land. In short, I don’t see or hear shit.
So... How long before tape and blank paper are banned on planes?
I Vaguely recall that in the dystopian world depicted in the Max Headroom TV series it was illegal to turn off TVs. It felt bonkers to me when I was a kid, but now it doesn't seem too far off.
And I'm sure this in no way will invade people's privacy.
"Hmm, why is the anti-queer politician sitting next to me being served dozens of male underwear ads? Hmmmm..."
"Why is my daughter receiving ads for newborn diapers? Hmmm..."
"Why is my neighbor receiving ads for anger management? Hmmm..."
He probably gets aggressive when seeing too many ads
Nothing a bit of paper/cardboard and a strip of tape can't fix.
Where's my duct tape and mini tool
Years ago I was on a flight where you couldn't turn this screen off. You could turn off the programming, but the screen still glowed. I discovered that if you take an advertisement from the back pocket and fold it, it can be inserted perfectly into the cracks around the screen and block it completely. Use the ads to block the ads.
Can I pull a boomer move and keep touching the screen repeatedly harder even though it's not a touch screen??? I MUST HAVE THIS, WHY IS IPAD NOT WORKING?!!!!!!!!
Yes, please! Keep pushing on the screen harder and harder until it breaks. Then do it on the screen next to you.
I must eat Cheetos or Doritos for Max effectiveness
Flight attendant: "Why are these screens pushed in and stained orange?"
Where's my high-powered magnet?
I'm sure there's something I can do to discreetly fuck up that screen.
A packet of printable stick-on shipping labels is like 5 bucks. 10 seconds to apply, probable never removable without damaging the screen.
Or those nice warranty stickers which disintegrate when peeling off
"weird, yeah I got here and this screen just had all this sharpie over it, i dunno how it happened"
A very sticky sticker will do a better job
Good luck with that. I’m gonna turn that bitch off one way or another.
Preferably "accidentally" damaging the screen
i read the article and it didn't seem to state. how will they target me? using the personal info I'm required to give them to book my flight? the origin and destinations and seat location? these are entirely different kinds of metrics. one is far more invasive. and is it tying into larger models they've purchased from like google or something? this is stupid and i hate it.
Until proven otherwise, I'd assume the worst. They know your identity to travel, and they link it with profiles from all the major ad networks.
I think you're spot on. In addition to needing to hand over your passport or state ID, your credit card, your email and phone number, what else would they need to target you?
Imagine if you're using your airline branded credit card to get free miles or a seat upgrade and they know all your purchase history.
Does united use the same in flight entertainment system as Delta? If united does they are probably tracking you using the facial detection camera on the seats.
I highly doubt that, the compute on these tablets is straight trash.
That is a proximity sensor. It allows the touch buttons on the bezel to light up when your hand approaches
No it's actually a facial recognition camera...
https://gizmodo.com/united-and-delta-cover-their-seatback-cameras-in-bid-to-1834381804
https://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/news/2019/02/26/some-delta-flights-have-cameras-in-seat-back.html
https://www.dallasnews.com/business/local-companies/2019/02/24/american-delta-and-united-swear-they-ve-never-used-those-seatback-cameras-staring-at-you/
https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/news/2019/03/01/some-airlines-have-cameras-installed-back-passengers-seats/3022742002/
Interesting. I guess it does both
Could be monitoring in flight wifi. I have no idea.
Nothing that some Self Adhesive Vinyl can't fix. They'll have to deal with getting it off the screen afterwards too. Want to fine me for it? Then tell me where you got the data, because I didn't consent to you having my data.
You probably did/do consent at some point, but nobody reads the fine print.
Calling into United:
I mean, fuck United tho and they will not be getting and damn money from me.
You bought the ticket right?
While in the EU or California, what ever works better...
The little guy always wins!
In david and goliath, david won. In the tortoise and the hare, the tortoise won. Rey Mysterio vs the 2006 Royal Rumble, Rey Mysterio won.
Hmmmm, you may be onto something!
That's what I'm saying! And I'm sure we could make up dozens more stories too.
Time for me to whip out my trusty old Black Sheet'o'Paper and masking tape....
Can you turn the screens off? I haven't flown in 5 years, but I just watched stuff off of my tablet instead.
In my experience yes, but some planes ive notice they turn back on each time there is an announcement, so depending on how many it can be annoying. Eother way advertising is a cancer that plagues our lives more and more.
You can, but I've stopped ever using them because the screen completely stops for every. Single. Announcement.
And now you can have your phone out for take off and landings, so yea no thanks I'll stick with my device that keeps working when they're making some random announcement about drinks or some shit
If you still can, they'll find ways to disable the option to turn them off, because it's time you don't watch an ad.
TRAAAAAIIIIIIIINS.
I wish I had train options where I live
I've heard they are great to cross oceans.
Distance between mainland Eurasia and mainland North America is 86 km. But you will have to use 1520 mm gauge.
It is a matter of time before they figure out how to do targeted ads in dreams.
If they do that, I will laser the optics off soviet early warning satellites and start thevnuclear holocaust. I think everyone would like that !
I'm sure they'll have an option where you can pay for them to go away ....
Basic economy will eventually only let you select any ad in their library. Actual content is for regular economy passengers only!
Cunts
I wonder how long it will be before they start giving discounts on tickets for interacting with the ads a certain number of times during the flight.
Never. The whole ad craze is there to milk profits on top of the things you already paid for.
What you are suggesting would actually be a more fair system.
Free with ads or paid with no ads.
Asshole corporations want paid and ads.
The Ad Algorithm
It knows when you are sleeping It knows when you're awake It knows when you've been bad or good So consume for goodness sake
Fuck this.
nodding off? time for a bright ad with super saturation and lots of brightness variability, they'll strobe you into paying attention.
how much do you have to pay to turn the fucking thing off?
Oh look, yet another reason why not to fly anymore!
Airlines in America really suck, I feel like we have much better options here in Europe
Yup.
My last flight a year ago was so bad I'm just going to drive from now on. I don't care if I have to take an extra day of PTO.
They do and I won't argue that point. It would fly in the face of everything I have seen. Multiple times I have flown on planes based in 3rd world countries to other 3rd world countries and each and every time it was a more pleasant experience than flying domestic in the US. I mean the whole thing. From being dropped off to the airport, to security, to food in the airport, to the comfort levels of the chairs, to the amount of leg room. All of it was better, all of it.
Plus our border is terrible as well. Last year took my family abroad and when we got back to the US my six year old put her little backpack on the scanner too quickly for the Border Guard liking. So the big manly tough guy screamed at my six year old. She proceeded to cry. I wanted to sock him across the face but not as much as I want to avoid a 20 year prison sentence. Next time I will go all Karen and write a letter to go in his file with his badge number. It will make me feel better but fix nothing.
i will be taping cardboard over the screen
Omg genius. What about the other hundred of screens of passengers around you?
so bring extra... noted.
Wireless ad blockers 5$ each
And for the low, low price of $4,99 you will get not one, not two but three ad blocking devices you can use to stop these ads from bothering you! Available in several cute patterns and colors. Get yours now, call now!
(warning: do not wash these cloths above 105°F or there might be ad-spillage while using the ad blocker due to shrinkage)
Airline CEOs doing their damnedest to out-fumble eachother.
Fumble what?
It's a completely regulatory captured industry that makes the majority of its profit from being financially engineered gift card style quasi banking institutions via their milage program agreements.
This is just more cash off the top. Free $$$$.
It's truly amazing....they must stand at the front of meetings and just ask "how do we make our passengers hate us most?"
Maybe I don't understand the economics of this move, but are they really going to make that much more money from targeted ads? If it's double the price, I assume it's worth it, but if it's a ~10% gain it's just dumb.
Numbers must go up at all costs. By the time the company's reputation hit rock bottom, the CEO already jumped ship to the next company.
Me, an italian, i see an underdevelopped species of "coffe" inside a soap dispender and die inside
Most people will be too busy with their laptops, tablets, and phones to pay any attention to whatever ads they put on those screens.
So it’s okay then.
It certainly wouldn't be OK for anyone that actually wants to use the in flight entertainment. I watch whatever TV shows and movies that I downloaded ad free and never turn on the seat back screens.
Finally I won't miss a moment of pornhub.
Man, we should break more stuff.
Are the ads selling life insurance?
Not if the flight is a Boeing.
edit: how to embedd youtube videos?
embedding arbitrary things was disabled a while back due to security reasons. Just link it
I don't want to click the news and give more data for capitalists. Where summary?
The "article" is like 100 words and just restates the title in more words.
Maybe the only information it adds is that they won't target passengers under 18
thanks