My dad passed away last February. One of the things I've always been grateful to him for was initiating so many family trips overseas when I was younger. I got to fly more often then than I am given the chance now. A lot of people hate the whole process of flying. Business professional gripe about all the elements associated with flying and GQ/Esquire and travel sites offer advice on how to "tolerate" the experience. Go through travel sites and forums and you would hear "experienced travelers"' gripe about everything under the sun while visiting a different country or city. They have no idea how lucky they are that they can afford to travel and sit inside an airplane (economy class or otherwise). Instead, they whine about queues and seek the creature comforts of their home country.
Me? I love the whole shebang - the occasionally inconvenient and frightening airport where airport staff can't always speak English, the overpriced airport stores, the thoroughly uncomfortable Economy Class, the somewhat annoying "newbie" fliers who rush to board the plane while taking photos, the ignorant and smug "tourists", and of course, the in-flight magazines.
I used to surreptitiously tuck in in-flight magazines into my carry-on just before the plane landed because when I was 8 years old I thought it was illegal to bring home anything from the plane. I forgot which airline it was but one airline had a small message at the bottom of the magazine informing the reader the magazine was yours to own - which made sense considering how expensive flight tickets were in the 80s and 90s. Since then, I've amassed airline magazines in a small but diverse collection I keep in a cardboard box. Some of my favorites were issues I swiped while flying British Airways, Air Canada, Quantas, Cathay Pacific, Philippine Airlines, and Korean Airlines (Delta and American sucks).
I get somewhat nonplussed when fliers don't even bother to browse through the free magazines and ignore them completely. These days, I'm more forgiving considering how repetitive airline magazines are. Most articles are poorly written by self-styled "travel writers" who fancy themselves worldly people but come out sounding smarmy, uneducated, arrogant, racist, and prejudiced. At least the writers over at Playboy and FHM are transparent about their perversions, humor, and their target audience. There are, however, many other things to appreciate from those magazines tucked in your front seat pocket - the great photography, the glossy papers, and the standard sections that make an inflight magazine what they are:
1. Travel routes, timetables, destinations of the airlines
2. The in-flight entertainment section (I love how they always have a jazz radio station and Asian music piped in)
3. Airport rules and airport maps (fascinating stuff)
4. Safety precautions (you'd be surprised how different they are between airlines)
5. Fleet information (BOEING and Airbus planes) and history
6. Duty Free shopping
Those are actually more fun to read than the self-satisfied drivel of the travel articles. I always get a thrill reading about airport rules and routes.
The quality of the airline is often reflected in the airline magazine. A cheap budget airline either doesn't have one or uses a poor quality of paper and are riddled with ads. Even troubled Japan Airlines (which I flew a few years back before they had legal and financial trouble) carried a very impressive spread when I flew to New York on one of their planes. They used high-quality stock glossy paper, had twice the number of pages, and had text for both English and Japanese readers. EVA and Cebu Pacific, on the other hand, have thin offerings with terrible content.
Today, I'm surprised that I still see most airlines carry print versions of in-flight magazines. British Airways recently released their In-flight magazine, First Life, on iTunes for its passengers. As mentioned, I don't fly very often but trips in the last few years to Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai, and New Jersey still happily resulted in a few issues of in-flight magazines for my collection. They're dead weight, which is the problem, but I can't bear to leave them in the front seat pockets. What I am curious about is why airlines are slow to migrate to ebook versions.
Obviously, tablets and smartphones are the new publishing medium. There are other advantages as well:
1. Paper printing is wasteful even if the airlines actually recycle their own wasted issues when fliers leave the issue on the plane.
2. Advertisers can pepper digital in-flight magazines with links to Hertz, Hilton, tour companies, and even restaurants. Yeah, I know you can get all that on the web or through iOS or Android apps, but this would be recommendations of companies the airlines is associated with. It's a sure win for the tourism industry and the airline industry!
3. They'll save on publishing costs and flight attendants won't have to bother about disseminating them (and cleaning up) every month when a new one comes out.
All an airline needs are exceptional writers who actually live in the destination routes (rather than expatriates with a superiority complex), great photographers, dependable advertisers, and have one guy layout the magazine using Adobe InDesign or open-source Scribus and export them to PDF. They can even use LibreOffice, MS Word, or any decent word processor to export to PDF or EPUB. Heck, they can even go one step further and use HTML5 or EPUB to publish their magazine and it would only take an afternoon to publish (compared to the traditional printing method). It takes less than a day's work to add designs and images and collate the airline-specific data (e.g. timetables, updated airport rules, etc.) I'd do it for free (I've always wanted to work for an airline but I'm vertically challenged)!
There are technological hurdles though. Although more and more fliers are toting iPads, Android tablets, and ereaders and business class has free Wi-fi (American Airlines has free Wi-Fi for some flights), the only viable way to have fliers get an electronic magazine is by wirelessly distributing the issue on the plane on the Wi-Fi landing page. Personally, I don't really need Wi-Fi on a flight (flying is entertaining enough) but it's probably the most practical way to distribute the rapidly dying in-flight magazine. NFC (Near Field Communication) is an unlikely possibility. An airline can install cheap low-level sensors/transmitters on each seat and fliers can just swipe their tablets or smartphones to get the latest issue. The problem is that NFC isn't a feature standard on most devices quite yet. If iPhones and the iPad are equipped with NFC chips, then it would be a no-brainer (and I'm pretty sure Android and Android developers will figure out a way to make NFC a standard on all Android devices). However, as of now, it still hasn't made it to the mainstream. QR codes are more realistic with a plane providing a wireless LAN service so when a flier bangs a QR code, it pulls up the magazine or website for reading. But again there goes the wireless problem. Until all airlines provide free WLAN (and they should), it's a tough and expensive call.
These days, the workaround is for the airline to offer a tablet or integrated entertainment system that can access the digital content. Unfortunately, most fliers ignore in-flight entertainment systems and prefer their own devices instead. Thus, the retention of the paper in-flight magazine - which gets ignored too.
In the meantime, I'm still tucking in in-flight magazines in my backpack on most of my flights, sliding them alongside my Ideapad, netbook, ereader, iPod Touch, and iPad and not really complaining about the extra weight. Although I've decreased my spending on paperback by nearly 95% since I started using a tablet and ereader, I still love the print medium and hope my mom never decides to throw away my in-flight magazine collection while I'm away.
Thanks for taking me on all those flights, dad. I'll see you on the flipside - that airport in the sky better have really good in-flight magazines. Preferably in PDF or EPUB format.
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