Over the holiday season, something like 7.5 million people will step foot in an airport and take to the skies. That’s a lot of delays, a lot of airport beers, and a lot of wondering about how the person in front of you has seemingly never gone through a security checkpoint before. But it also means a lot of in-flight entertainment. So, before the chaos-fueled travels begin, The Ringer is proud to introduce Airplane Movies Day, in honor of the things we watch on our tiny seat-back screens to get us through the flight.
This summer, a spate of stories recounted the purported—and deeply unfortunately named—trend of “raw-dogging” flights. It’s a practice in which monastic—nay, positively masochistic—airline passengers spurn the creature comforts of books, movies, television, and even Candy Crush to entertain themselves with only the live flight map for the duration of their journey. How could they have survived? the coverage demanded to know. Is there anything duller than a seat-back flight map?
Allow me to answer the latter: Yes. In fact, there are a great many things that are duller than the map, including the readily available oeuvre of a celebrated auteur director, the printing of whose name would force me to enter witness protection, or at the very least file for COBRA. The raw-dogging chroniclers (ugh) and especially the raw-dogging practitioners (ugh) foolhardy enough to boast about it missed the point entirely. The flight map isn’t the least entertaining thing on a plane—it’s the most.
How fast is the plane going? Very! How cold is it outside? Very! How early is it in Maui? Very! How far has the tiny cartoon plane advanced since you last checked on it? Not very, but that’s fine—you’re gaining on Fez, or Macau, or at any rate, Albuquerque.
Also? The flight tracker is incredibly popular. In industry terms, the seat-back screen on a plane, with its panoply of film, television, and, yes, map options is known as in-flight entertainment, or IFE. While numbers fluctuate depending on region and route, industry data holds that 70 percent of passengers use their seat’s IFE during a flight. Of those, about half shun movies, TV, and games in order to watch the map.
“Maps aren’t just popular—they’re indispensable,” says Duncan Jackson, the president of FlightPath3D, a provider of moving map services to commercial airlines whose clients include American Airlines, Delta, Southwest, United, and Virgin Atlantic. “For some airlines, they’re the most watched in-flight entertainment option. Delta reports about half of their passengers engage with the map in-flight and 20 percent of passengers only watch the map.”
Indeed, Delta recently said that the in-flight map is the single most watched content option on its seat-back entertainment systems. In other words: Raw-doggers aren’t mythic hermits. They’re perfectly normal—one might even say common.
Live airline maps have been around since the 1980s, when they were introduced by a company called Airshow Inc. In the years since, with the blossoming advancements in satellite imagery and GPS, the maps have dramatically improved: Modern offerings from Airshow and other providers typically provide a wide range of view options, with local points of interest labeled and richly illustrated. Many moving map and IFE companies are rapidly investing in integrating AI into their products, all the better to help you find the best place to grab a burger while your plane circles the airport. FlightPath3D’s AI assistant even has a catchy name: Luci. Jackson says that Luci is set to appear on more than 2,000 aircraft worldwide by next year. (Until recently, Airshow, which is owned by Collins Aerospace, has remained a heavyweight among moving map providers on commercial airlines; however, reached this week for comment, a spokesperson for Collins told The Ringer that “Collins is no longer in the commercial airliner moving map market” though it “will continue to operate in the business aviation market.”)
Airplane Movies Day
Moving maps work by using location data generated by an aircraft’s flight management system, which is typically fed into a server on the plane that spawns the live illustration that a wanderlusting traveler can access from their seat. These maps differ greatly from the ones that pilots see in the cockpit, although many moving maps now offer the option to watch an animated facsimile of what the pilots can view in the front of the plane. In reality, however, the pilots are seeing a great deal more than appears for even the most map-addled seat-back connoisseur in the cabin: While knowing you’re passing over the Grand Canyon might be of great interest to a passenger peering down from their window, it’s likely of limited use to an aviator keeping tabs on passing airport codes.
“Passenger maps are all about simplicity and engagement—they show live locations, flight paths, and ETAs,” says Ric Cantalupo of AdonisOne Inflight Systems, which specializes in portable IFEs. “Pilots’ maps, on the other hand, are technical tools packed with real-time weather updates, traffic data, and navigational overlays.”
In this age of handheld devices, you could be forgiven for thinking that the days of seat-back screens were numbered: How could that fusty old mount with omnipresent glare and minimal-at-best touch-screen responsiveness compete with your phone or tablet fresh from the latest trade-in cycle? For a while, that seemed to be the way things were headed, fueled not a little bit by the prospective cost savings for airlines in ditching seat-back screens—which not only carry a steep price per unit but also impact a flight’s weight and thus have their own fuel and bulk demands.
Indeed, some airlines—notably American—have spent years extolling the virtues of personal devices as they’ve busied themselves with the wholesale removal of IFE on many planes. But others have gone the opposite direction: Last year, United ordered 300,000 new Panasonic screens for its fleet alongside pledges to put seat-back screens on every one of its planes. One key reason why: As with consumer electronics, modern seat-back devices are better and—critically—much lighter than the displays of yore, even when the screens themselves are much larger than their predecessors.
“Every now and then you’ll end up on a flight with a really old six- or seven-inch, four-by-three [aspect ratio] display, and you can understand why it wasn’t always a better experience,” says Justin Watson, a customer success manager at the Oregon-based IFE company Rosen Aviation. “But now it is.”
Screen innovations have been slow to come to commercial airlines, partly due to the cost for an airline looking to upgrade a fleet en masse and partly due to the extensive certification requirements enforced by the FAA, according to Watson. But modern displays are finally starting to arrive—and with them, much better maps.
Rosen Aviation, whose client base is primarily made up of private and chartered jets, touts its ability to customize its IFE displays. A leisure airline that frequents vacation destinations could, for example, have a map that eschewed nearby mountain ranges and bodies of water in favor of pointing out the various Sandals and Club Meds scattered below the clouds. Owners of planes both large and small reliably demand that the plane’s appearance—what’s called its livery—on the in-flight map match its real-life paint job and design; if you look at the map on a Delta plane, you’ll see a cartoon with the airline’s telltale red and blue tail. Customization can be especially important for what Watson describes as the growing market of “VVIP aviation”: “You know, your Saudi princes and things like that, with wide-body aircraft that are bigger than most of our houses.”
“Especially in corporate aviation and VVIP aviation, no passenger wants to see a generic airplane on the map,” says Watson. “They all expect to be able to upload the livery of their aircraft. Same make, same model, same paint job, tail number, everything.” All the better to watch as the plane’s animated twin creeps onward across the globe.
Asked if he was familiar with the recent “raw-dogging” kerfuffle, Watson laughed very hard, then expressed surprise that the vaunted map might be considered so low in the entertainment ranks as to be a part of the in-flight forbearance. He conceded that not everyone considers the flight tracker to be primary entertainment; some, perhaps, just have it on in the background.
Still, according to Watson, even that has merits for the wayward traveler. “Just having it up offers some kind of comfort and reassurance,” he says. “It’s visual white noise.”
