Sir Richard: I'm not inclined to complain about Virgin America, since I've just had such a jolly time flying in your airplanes. I really like the attitude and style you've brought to discount flying. I love the purple mood lights. I like the crew's attitude. I love the wifi on every airplane and the power plugs (which I only just discovered on this flight). I even like the dorky on-screen ordering system for food and snacks, a major improvement over pushing the flight-attendant call button to which flight attendants on other airlines don't seem to respond. But...
I seem to have gotten on the closest thing to a flight from hell, VX 23 from JFK to SFO. The first two hours were spent in pretty rocky turbulence, the kind where the crew has to stay buckled in. (The pilot warned us before we took off, so I didn't think too much about the Air France flight that fell into the Atlantic.) And then, as soon as the seat belt light went off, half the plane sprinted for the bathrooms. Being in the window seat, I wait for the rush to get over, by which time the service cart was blocking the aisle to the lower class bathrooms. and the very same, snippy flight attendant (see below) told me to wait for 10 minutes. I had to go, so I broke the code and went into Upper Class. Phew...
I have one really important suggestion: Perhaps you could train your flight attendants to have a different response than, “We’re not trained to do technical support for GoGoLink WiFi”. The WiFi on our flight didn't work for the first three hours. Your flight attendant suggested that I call GoGo directly. So I observed that I pay for Virgin America to fly the airplane and that I generally don't try to figure out what's wrong with the airplane. Since you had personally promoted the WiFi service on the video screen before the flight took off, I thought that perhaps there was another way to fix the WiFi service than asking customers to do it. I showed her the computer screen that said “Service Unavailable: Sorry, the Gogo Inflight Internet service is currently down. Please try again later.” I said that I didn’t think I would be able to diagnose the technical problem either, since the server was unavailable, and that she could help inform the other passengers that there is a problem and that it was being worked on. (She did that about an hour later, after someone official communicated to the airplane, presumably, that the service wasn't working. It's always nice to be treated in a trusting manner, eh?)
To be honest, Sir Richard, I don’t think I should have to tell your flight attendant these things. I think maybe you could provide training to your flight attendants for a better way to respond to customers having a problem with WiFi. And, in this particular case, I need to observe that this particular flight attendant did not seem to have the Virgin America spirit that I’ve observed so consistently on my last six flights with the airline. She seemed perturbed that I would actually tell her that there is a problem and seek her understanding and guidance. Indeed, she seemed rather snippy, as I believe that you British people like to say.
Anyway, the WiFi service has now come on, and I am posting this from 38,046 miles above Utah. I love watching my plane make its way across the country on the screen in front of me. In fact, I even posted this photo to my Facebook profile from the flight to JFK last Wednesday: I loved the idea of watching the plane land from inside the plane that was actually landing!
