I'll never fly United again. I had a similar experience for 14 hours. It isn't just the in flight entertainment. In my experience their staff are rude and borderline incompetent. There must be a poor culture in the company as a whole. My wife just flew with them and went nearly 10 hours without a meal while she was flying with our two year old.

Edit: spelling

My favorite United moment, immediately following a hard landing. Flight attendant (loud enough for a lot of people to hear): "That was the worst landing all year. They really should teach these guys to land the planes before they let them fly them."

Don't get me started on United. I refuse to fly with them (LHR to SFO about 4 times a year) for a myriad of reasons, not limited to: food quality, delays, total failure of in-flight entertainment system and taking an extra 1.5 days to get me home (direct flight cancelled, so shunted via Dulles). I'm a tolerant person, but United excelled at pissing me off.

Yeah! I have been flying for decades. Delta seems to have a cycle of climbing to excellence and falling. United Air Lines has always made me miserable reliably.

Agreed. Nearly every time there will be stewardesses who look like they have some kind of job guarantee or something and they don't even pretend to be polite. So much different from Southwest or even the other dirt cheap airlines (e.g. Frontier).

It sounds like you were on a fairly old United plane (CRTs in the aisle). While there are newer planes with seat-back screens, their newest planes eschew any sort of seat-back entertainment completely. At least on domestic flights, it's been a while since I've flown internationally.

This is a deliberate decision that airlines are starting to make. If most passengers are bringing a wifi-capable device (ipad, phone, etc), then why go to the extra expense (and weight) to support seat-back screens?

Now, my main experience with this has been flying within the US where none of the newest planes have screens. Internationally, there may still be screens included in newer planes, but when screens = weight, and weight = $$$, it's not surprising that they are getting removed. Moreover, screens = depth, which when removed can make room for more rows, which means more money.

If this electronics ban takes hold though, I'd expect for there to be a big rethink about this.

Spirit airlines has the thinnest seats I've ever seen on an airplane. It's a metal sheet with thin foam and leather over it. Certainly no room for any seat-back entertainment.

I'll gladly let the airline shove more seats in by thinning them out, than by reducing my leg room any further.

https://www.sanspotter.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/las_sa...

The problem was the wifi was incapable of handling all the passengers trying to connect throughout the entire flight from SFO to LHR. Even if I wanted to pay them money to watch a movie, I couldn't.

So United saved costs by not retrofitting their airplanes with seatback screens and by offering shit wifi.

Of course Louis CK would say: https://youtu.be/ZFsOUbZ0Lr0

United is just a bad airline. I've had better service in Economy class on SWISS than I had in business on United.

Yep. Turkish Airlines is the 7th best airline in the world, and the best in Europe, according to Skytrax: http://www.airlinequality.com/news/2016-world-airline-awards...

In last 2 years Turkish Airlines had 3 serious accidents. In 2015 they have seriously damaged their plane twice during landing in Kathmandu and Istanbul. In 2017 they lost plane that they have been operating which killed all 4 crew members and at least 34 people on the ground when it crashed in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.[1]

Also their primary hub Istanbul Ataturk Airport (IST) was attacked in 2016, which left 45 people killed and more than 230 people injured.[2]

I am not sure what criteria they use to issue this award, but they do not look safe enough to me to be on the 7th best position in the world.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Airlines#Incidents_and... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Atat%C3%BCrk_Airport_atta...

Dead people can't fill out surveys. ;)

I knew of the attack at Ataturk Airport and I'm fine with a layover there. I'd even change to a stopover to hang out in Istanbul again, but don't have the time this trip. If you can get over your fears and fly the two airlines, I'm sure you'll find Turkish to be a better experience than United.

I flew United frequently before 2016 to Africa, Europe, and Asia and all the flights had full size screens in economy and economy plus. The handheld streaming is common for domestic flights.

747s are all streaming.

> In 2016, the United airplane I was in still did not have a seatback screen

This just depends which plane you get. They all have new and old planes, you can get unlucky on any airline.

I haven't got "unlucky" on an international BA flight in 15+ years. So no, it doesn't just depend on the plane.

I flew Cape Town to LHR in January on BA and my entertainment system was stuck in a loop, booting into RedHat over and over again

But at least it's finally the year of Linux in the headrest.

It's not new. I had a 4-hour wait at the terminal to get to a KLM plane in Chengdu a bit over 10 years ago, this was perhaps 2006. The reason became clear when they informed us upon boarding that "the in-flight entertainment system is unfortunately not available, but it is not connected to flight systems and has no impact on flight security".

The entertainment system on the seat backs was Linux in a reboot loop.

Does Turkish Airlines have airplanes in their fleet without seatback screens? Do these planes fly international routes?

Not sure about TA, but my experience is that 95% of this is just about when the planes get bought. Entertainment systems solve the "keep people happy problem" for relatively cheap. But it's pretty expensive to replace all the seats just for that.

JAL/ANA have very new planes with cool entertainment systems, but they also fly their older planes on some routes with a bunch of stuff that looks like it's powered by VCR.

To your question: they probably don't for their major international flights.

I can't think of a single European airline that does not have seat-back IFE on long-haul flights. The same goes for the ME3 airlines.