Flying Virgin Air felt like reaching into tomorrow. Intellectually I knew what sort of experience it was going to be, I’d read articles about the in flight interactive computers and seen shiny, smiling pictures of people enjoying the interior of the plane, but I didn’t understand how, as an experience, it would be so comfortable and intuitive, yet subtly new.
I loved it. I loved the psychiatry precise Buddha Box ambient music, the violet lights softening the iPlane cigarette-white edges of the comfortably wide seats, the oddly flawless hand-set/computer-keyboard controller, the look&feel of the touch-screen design, and even the this-close-to-annoying mock trendy animation that explained what to do in event of a crash. Everything about the flight was a visceral reminder that we’re already in the future and you would have crashed that flying car anyway. I felt like a target market perfectly catered to, coddled, even in business class, with a desire to do it again instilled in me immediately, a thousand times more powerful than any advertisement could.
Clicking the handset out of the armrest, I clicked through the computer system, poking at everything that was available. (No one else signed onto the seat-to-seat chat, unfortunately, but it was enough that the option was there.) Finding a Music section, I braced myself for a tedious, arduous list of tenaciously popular artists, only to be pleasantly surprised. I found jazz, indie, rock, pop, techno, classical, and opera – everything I listen to at home, alphabetically listed all the way to Frank Zappa. Satisfied, I leaned back and shrugged out of my shoes. My schizophrenic play-list was a lovely thing, (inspiring me to want a long, intimate dinner with whoever programmed Virgin Air’s music selection), matched in beauty only by the ridiculously cotton pink dawn beginning to break so perfectly outside my airplane window.