Gary Gale

Posts about ba

Bad Cartography - Stansted, Essex (Airport) vs. Stansted, Kent (Not An Airport)

It has to be said, short haul European flights are a bit on the boring side. Once you've read the day's newspaper, had a drink and a snack and read a few chapters of a book there's not much else to do. Most airlines that hop between European destinations don't have inflight wifi yet and there's no inflight entertainment to be had, except to watch your progress towards your destination on the map that appears on the screen over your head.

So it was with this map, which was snapped on a flight a few days ago from Rome's Fiumicino airport to London's Heathrow was coming to a close. But there's something wrong with this map.

If there's one thing that stands out more than a map that says "you are here", it's a map that says "you are here" and seems to get the map wrong.

It has to be said, short haul European flights are a bit on the boring side. Once you've read the day's newspaper, had a drink and a snack and read a few chapters of a book there's not much else to do. Most airlines that hop between European destinations don't have inflight wifi yet and there's no inflight entertainment to be had, except to watch your progress towards your destination on the map that appears on the screen over your head.

So it was with this map, which was snapped on a flight a few days ago from Rome's Fiumicino airport to London's Heathrow was coming to a close. But there's something wrong with this map.

stansted

London has three major airports, of which Heathrow is the only one that's anywhere near Central London. The other two, Gatwick and Stansted, are out in the so called Home Counties, in Sussex and in Essex respectively. But that's not what the inflight map seems to show. Or does it? The map seems to show that we were flying directly over Stansted but that somehow London's third airport had mysteriously been moved from the north east of London to south of the River Thames, somewhere south of Gravesend.

My gut reaction was that the inflight map was just wrong. But the clue to this in all in the name Stansted (and not Stanstead as it's commonly misspelt). There is indeed a Stansted (a small village notable for a lack of airport) in Kent as well as a Stansted (and an airport) in Essex.

All of which makes me wonder just what the map's cartographers were thinking when they thought to put the village of Stansted, with a population of around 200, on an inflight map and with seemingly equal billing with some of the UK's major cities and manage to confuse it with a major UK airport. This isn't a recent map slip up either, as Wikipedia reports that this has been in place since 2007.

In early 2007, British Airways mistakenly used inflight 'skymaps' that relocated Stanstead Airport, Essex to Stansted in Kent. Skymaps show passengers their location, but the mistake was luckily not replicated on the pilots' navigation system. BA blamed outside contractors hired to make the map. "It was the mistake of the independent company that produced the software," said a spokeswoman. "The cartographer appears to have confused the vast Essex airport, which handles 25 million passengers a year, with this tiny Kent village, also called Stansted, which has a population of around 200".

Time for a refresh of British Airway's inflight maps I think.

From Where 2.0 To Just Where; With Meh 2.0 Somewhere In The Middle

Where 2012 draws to a close and the lobby of the Marriott Marquis in San Francisco fills with a slew of geo'd-out delegates waiting to check out, it's time for the traditional post conference retrospective writeup. If you were at Where this year or in previous years you'll probably want to skip ahead to the next paragraph, right now. Where, previously called Where 2.0, is one of the annual maps, geo, location conferences. Though it's very Californian and eye wateringly expensive, it's still the place to go to talk, listen and announce anything related to the nebulous industry we call Geo.

After skipping Where 2.0 last year, this year I returned as part of the Nokia contingent and found out that some things had changed.

And so, as Where 2012 draws to a close and the lobby of the Marriott Marquis in San Francisco fills with a slew of geo'd-out delegates waiting to check out, it's time for the traditional post conference retrospective writeup. If you were at Where this year or in previous years you'll probably want to skip ahead to the next paragraph, right now. Where, previously called Where 2.0, is one of the annual maps, geo, location conferences. Though it's very Californian and eye wateringly expensive, it's still the place to go to talk, listen and announce anything related to the nebulous industry we call Geo.

After skipping Where 2.0 last year, this year I returned as part of the Nokia contingent and found out that some things had changed.

Firstly, Where 2.0 was no more. O'Reilly have rebranded the conference as simply Where, with the strapline of the business of location. The conference had also moved from its traditional San Jose venue, via the soul desert that is the Santa Clara Convention centre last year, to a new home at the Marriott Marquis slap bang in the middle of downtown San Francisco.

Secondly, and probably more importantly, whilst Where was as slick and well put together as it's always been, something was missing. It's not easy to put my finger on what precisely was lacking. There seemed to be a lack of ... buzz, for want of a better word. It felt ... muted. Numbers were certainly down from previous years but that alone can't account for the feeling, or lack of it, this year. Granted, the venue was excellent, the food was as well too. The coffee was ... Starbucks. We can't have it all. The wifi almost held up. I met up with a lot of old friends and colleagues, including some from Yahoo! and the after show parties were edgy and the bar was open, free and copiously stocked.

But it did feel more Meh 2.0 (to be said out loud with an indifferent shrug of the shoulders) rather than Where 2.0, and from speaking to other people, I'm not alone in thinking this.

So enough introspection, to the point of this post, which is retrospection. Let's start with the high points.

This was most definitely a Nokia event. Not only were we Gold sponsors of the event but I was lucky enough to get a speaking slot, my second Where appearance, and I was amply aided and abetted by a geographically dispersed crowd of fellow Nokians hailing from not only The Valley, but Atlanta GA, Chicago IL and Berlin. As a bonus, I got to do not one, but two product launches, plus some sneak peeks at what's coming up location wise from the company.

Meh 2.0 notwithstanding, it was also good to see several Yahoo! alumni for a long overdue catchup. Geo-beers may have been conspicuous by their absence, but geo-cocktails were very much apparent.

Sadly, Yahoo! also provided probably the lowest point of the whole conference. Right slap bang in the middle of proceedings, Yahoo! announced yet another round of layoffs, culling almost 2000 employees. When this happens, the last place you want to be when you're waiting to hear whether you still have a job is at a conference and my heart just went out to my ex-colleagues who had to sit their, with a fixed smile on their face, as they waited to hear news from the Yahoo! mothership down in Sunnyvale.

So, to recap, a mixed bag of events and emotions at this year's Where. Personally and professionally I think it was a great, team aided, success. Hopefully we'll all return next year to find the "wow" at Where is back and to put the "meh" firmly behind us.

Wrapping this retrospective up, I should include the traditional slide deck from my talk, together with my notes. You'll find them below, hosted on Scribd this time as an embedded PDF. Since Slideshare went freemium, my decks are now just too big to be hosted by their free account offering which has a 10MB limit. At some point, I'll drag all my decks from Slideshare and put them up on Scribd.

[scribd id=100298958 key=key-23j0fhnk1syubpgvzv5n mode=list]

Slide 2

Good afternoon everyone. I'm Gary. I'm a geo-technologist by profession and a geographer at heart. I’m the Director of Places for Nokia’s Location and Commerce group.

Slide 3

But first some recent history. If you were here at last year’s Where, you would have heard Michael Halbherr, the head of Nokia’s Location & Commerce, introducing you to a concept … a truly global location platform, one that is built on the world’s most accurate mapping and navigation assets. If you were at Nokia World in London in October, you would have heard me talk about the launch of what we now call the Where Platform. Fast forward to today and I want to update you on how Nokia is continuing to deliver on the promise that Michael and I talked about in San Jose and in London … to grow the “Where” ecosystem, to provide a horizontal yet device agnostic set of API offering and a growing list of companies and apps that are using these APIs.

At Nokia Location & Commerce, our aim is to be the Where company. Why?

Today, the internet is well organised around the concepts of “What” and “Who” with search engines and social networks providing the answers to these questions. We are striving to provide answers to questions of “Where.”

Location is massively important to today’s internet, whether it’s on mobile devices, on tablets, on laptops or the other myriad ways in which we access the internet. Over 40% of mobile searches have location within them or are looking for local information. There’s a hunger for location-relevant information and this proves to us that the concept of “local” has never been more essential to today’s users, customers and consumers.

Slide 4

The days of someone owning a single internet connected device are almost over. We’re now buying, owning and using multiple mobile devices. At the same time, these devices are getting smarter – firstly, because they are increasingly connected to the cloud and secondly because they are sensor-rich. From NFC for payment in stores and on transport, to more advanced sensors that interpret if you’re running versus taking a bus, all the way to sensors that connect with devices like wrist band heart rate monitors – these sensor-rich devices provide us with critical data that helps us better understand location related behavior which in turn helps us to identify patterns and trends.

To build the Where Platform, we believe you need four essential components … data, a platform that uses this data, APIs that expose the platform and apps and experiences that showcase the power of the platform and its data.

Slide 5

So first, there’s data; we have a lot of data, from best-in-class, navigation quality, mapping assets through to global, yet local, location based data.

Slide 6

The Where Platform is built on top of this data and what’s more, it learns from the data. We call this a learning engine and it’s because there’s really two sorts of data out there … reference data and activity data.

Let’s start with a Place. Where and what is this Place? This is reference data, the index of world around us and it enables the routine location functions we take for granted, such as search, routing and navigation.

Then there’s activity data that utilizes the types of sensors I just spoke about to understand how people interact with their devices, their apps and the real world around them.

Or to put it another way, we know about a Place and we can know what actually happens, in the real world, at this Place. Put these two types of data together and it becomes what we call smart data and it’s this that powers the Where Platform and enable us to create a digital, predictive model from all the Places and objects in the physical world, including our user’s needs and activities.

Slide 7

The reference and activity data I mentioned earlier, combined as smart data, powers the Where Platform. The platform in turn powers the showcase for this, our apps, which I’ll cover in a few slides time. But apps aren’t enough in today’s world, you need robust APIs as well.

There is a unique opportunity to work with you and with developers to build the where-enabled ecosystem; across verticals and across the screens we use on a daily basis, to power the experiences you’re building for your users.

So let’s dig a bit deeper into the APIs …

Slide 8

We already have a set of modular, configurable, highly performant APIs that are easy to use and to integrate, with an active developer community who appreciate our simple and fair terms of use. For the web, we have JavaScript APIs for Maps and for Places as well as a new Places web service API, more of which in a few moments. We’re going to be unifying the JavaScript APIs for Maps and for Places into single API under the Nokia Maps for JavaScript API banner.

There’s also our Map Image web service API and our upcoming Maps API for HTML5, which I’ll talk more about in a few slide’s time.

And for native mobile use, there’s out Maps API for Qt and our Places API for JavaME and coming later this year our Maps API for Windows Phone.

Slide 9

APIs are of course utterly critical to the Where platform and the Where ecosystem but we also to ensure that we cover all the screens that act as touch-point between the digital and real words for people throughout their day. As I move from my computer at work, to my laptop, to my in-car nav system, to my tablet, our goal is to have an offering for virtually any of these screens.

In addition to the Places API, I also touched on APIs for Qt, for Windows Phone and for JavaME for Nokia devices. For non-Nokia handsets and platforms, you can already see the power of the NLP on maps.nokia.com on the web and coming soon will be native HTML5 support.

You may already know of the Nokia Maps app for Windows Phone, but Nokia Maps is already available via the Amazon Android Store and includes routing for drive, walk and public transport.

We’re also announcing a closed beta of our Nokia Maps HTML5 API, which is the first of many huge milestones we hope to achieve to expand our APIs and presence across screens as quickly as possible.

Slide 10

I mentioned a few slides back that we’re making a commitment to support the Where Platform across all screens, by making the platform device agnostic and truly horizontal. You may recognise the mobile devices behind me and, although these are screenshots of our maps on both Android and iOS, these are not mocks-ups, they’re from real proof of concepts, using the Where Platform. But these are not apps that we’re releasing so don’t rush to your mobiles to try and download them. But if you want to see them live, in action and in person, you’ll be able to see and play with them at the Nokia booth.

Slide 11

Now, a few slides back I mentioned our Places web service API. This is in addition to our Places API for JavaScript and so I’m really pleased, or as we say in Britain, chuffed, to announce the public beta of this …

Through our Places API you can: Discover Places by searching explicitly and nearby Display Place information, basic and extended data attributes, rich content, editorial and user generated content; this is far more than the offerings of some of our competitors Interact with a Place, share it, navigate to it

Through the Nokia Places API, you can find locations in more than 1.5 million areas (cities, districts, and regions) as well as more than 120 million point addresses across 15 countries.

Slide 12

The term Places API is usually synonymous with searching for Place information and with displaying a page containing this information, but there’s far more to Places that just this. Look at these heat maps behind me; they’re great examples of the type of experience you can create using the Nokia Places API. These dynamic heat maps are produced by combining Place categories and other algorithmic inputs to show were you might want to eat or shop. This is great for getting a feel for a locality that you may be unfamiliar with.

We know that a powerful set of API offerings is critical to our ability to recruit partners to help build the Where ecosystem. This is why I’m excited to share the launch of the Nokia Places API web service with you today.

Slide 13

At Nokia, we realize that becoming the Where company is not an easy task. The Platform alone is not enough, nor is produced a set of APIs enough. There needs to be support, documentation and tools which work the way you work. But we also know that sometimes you just want to join in the fun. And so, over the past year we have been working hard to grow the Where ecosystem.

We’ve added customers such as those listed here and these have increased the hits to the platform from 560M/month in Q1 2011 to 4.6B/month in Q1 of this year; that’s around a 750% increase.

Slide 14

For example, we have been working with Yahoo! since late 2010. All Yahoo! sites that have a map element will be served by one of Nokia’s Location & Commerce data center locations around the world.

Slide 15

Whenever one of millions of Yahoo! users checks out a location, Yahoo! sources its mapping/imagery, routing, traffic, and geocoding services from the Where Platform.

As Dirk Daumann (Nokia Head of Map Services Platform) says “We have served millions of Yahoo! users worldwide for around 150 days. Our service has been available to 99.9 per cent. This means that we have constantly exceeded what was agreed, something that we are very proud of. During peaks, we serve 1200 queries per second, a number that we estimate to grow when the transition of all Yahoo! sites to our services has been completed.”

Slide 16

Additionally, we recently announced our partnership with Groupon to collaborate on a redesign of the customer experience of deal discovery, purchase and redemption.

We plan to do this by working with them to offer market-leading, location-sensitive discounts and deals that are more locally relevant and convenient. By the way, as we’re early in our relationship with Groupon, the graphics you can see behind me are a mock-up, not a real app, so no heading to the Marketplace to download please.

Slide 17

What I’ve just been talking to you about over the last 15 minutes or so, shows, I hope, the massive amount of investment and commitment we’ve made over the past year to building a where-enabled ecosystem and in achieving our goal of becoming the Where company.

Similar to our Platform and APIs, we’ve met major milestones with our apps as well. Today, we have 5 apps that are based upon and showcase the Where Platform:

Nokia Drive provides free, in car navigation for driving and reaching destinations safely. Nokia Transport allows you to have all your commuter information at your fingertips: No more carrying around city maps or timetables—it is all on your device, wherever you are. Nokia Maps provides new ways to discover and explore the world around you. Nokia City Lens is an augmented reality browser turns a phone’s camera viewfinder into a new way to spot nearby attractions, shops, restaurants and places of interest. Nokia Pulse is an exciting new way to privately check in, meet up and stay in touch with the people, like family and close friends—with just one click.

In fact, these apps are one of the best ways to illustrate the power of the Where Platform. What we’ve done with our apps is just the beginning. And with the power of the platform and our APIs, the opportunities for you to build unique, location-relevant solutions are endless.

Slide 18

We see an opportunity to work with you to build a where-enabled ecosystem. For all of us to become part of something bigger. To be part of an ecosystem that stretches across screens. That spans B2C, B2B and B2D. That answers consumer’s where-related questions and empowers them to explore and enjoy the increasingly merged physical and digital world around them.

If you’re interested in discussing further how we can work together, please swing by the Nokia booth – it’s number 208.

Slide 19

… thank you for listening

At The Airport, Not All QR Codes Are Created Equal

bags X-Rayed or searched and on engaging flight-safe mode on your mobile phone/tablet/e-book reader/laptop.

Last week, flying from London Heathrow to Berlin's Tegel airport I found a new addition to the increasingly detached-from-reality world of airline security ... the electronic boarding pass. In principle, the electronic boarding pass is a great idea. First introduced in 1999 by Alaska Airways, checking into your flight online and putting a QR code on a graphic of your boarding pass cuts down queueing and waiting at the airport. Some airlines either send you the boarding pass as an SMS message, as an email attachment or as a time limited web URL. Some airlines provide an app on your phone; British Airways falls into this category and their app covers Windows Phone 7, iOS, Android and Blackberry.

Another day, another flight, another addition to the ever growing and increasingly arcane number of steps that you need to go through in order to get through an airport and actually take off on a plane. I've written before on the world of airport security, be it having your bags X-Rayed or searched and on engaging flight-safe mode on your mobile phone/tablet/e-book reader/laptop.

Last week, flying from London Heathrow to Berlin's Tegel airport I found a new addition to the increasingly detached-from-reality world of airline security ... the electronic boarding pass. In principle, the electronic boarding pass is a great idea. First introduced in 1999 by Alaska Airways, checking into your flight online and putting a QR code on a graphic of your boarding pass cuts down queueing and waiting at the airport. Some airlines either send you the boarding pass as an SMS message, as an email attachment or as a time limited web URL. Some airlines provide an app on your phone; British Airways falls into this category and their app covers Windows Phone 7, iOS, Android and Blackberry.

With this in mind, consider the following electronic boarding pass, taken from last week's flight.

Berlin Boarding Pass - Original

This boarding pass gets checked three times between the time I arrive at the airport and the time my posterior makes contact with seat 11C. The first time is at security when the QR code gets scanned; if the QR code is valid, I'm granted access to the airside part of the terminal at Heathrow, but my passport isn't checked so as long as the QR code says it's valid, I'm through. The second time is at the gate. Again, the QR code is scanned and this time it's cross checked with my passport; so not only is the boarding pass valid, but I can prove that the name on my passport and the name on the boarding pass matches. The third and final time, is when I actually board the plane and the cabin crew visually check that the boarding pass is actually for that flight.

Now consider this version of the boarding pass. The QR code is able to be scanned and it contains exactly the same information as the previous one. It will get me through the first two boarding pass checks but apparently it won't allow me onto the aircraft. Why? When boarding last week's flight the member of the cabin crew who checked my boarding pass told me she needed to "scroll your phone" and "check that your boarding pass isn't a photo". the underlying assertion here being that if I wasn't using a boarding pass on BA's own mobile app, I couldn't board the flight.

Berlin Boarding Pass - Copy

If your eyes are crossing from concentration at this point, you're not alone. I still haven't been able to comprehend what the difference is between a valid QR code, which is itself a graphic image, in BA's mobile app and a screen shot of the QR code, which is, err, a graphic image. I have an even harder time comprehending how this makes the theatre of airline security any safer for me or for my fellow passengers.

The BA Mobile Boarding Pass; So Right And Yet So Wrong

KLM from Amsterdam's Schipol airport. The system was quick, easy and worked, even though some of the staff at Schipol seemed a bit confused by me whipping out my mobile when they asked for my boarding pass, rather than the conventional printed boarding pass. At the time, I wondered when British Airways would follow suit. Now more than a year later, they have. Now to be fair, this system may have been in place for a while, but if it was it escaped me. Maybe I missed an email or some junk mail about this, but the first I heard of it when when I saw that the BA app on my iPhone had a new version and after some poking around to see what was new I saw the option for a mobile boarding pass.

While boarding passes on your mobile handset have been around for a while in one form or another, I only came across them just over a year ago while flying on KLM from Amsterdam's Schipol airport. The system was quick, easy and worked, even though some of the staff at Schipol seemed a bit confused by me whipping out my mobile when they asked for my boarding pass, rather than the conventional printed boarding pass. At the time, I wondered when British Airways would follow suit. Now more than a year later, they have. Now to be fair, this system may have been in place for a while, but if it was it escaped me. Maybe I missed an email or some junk mail about this, but the first I heard of it when when I saw that the BA app on my iPhone had a new version and after some poking around to see what was new I saw the option for a mobile boarding pass.

KLM Mobile Boarding Pass

I fly on British Airways almost every week. While they may be the self proclaimed World's Favourite Airline, they're not the best there is. But flying British Airways means I get to fly out of Heathrow's Terminal 5, by far the best terminal at that airport. It means I get to use the BA lounges, thanks to BA's frequent flyer program. It means I get to fly direct to most destinations rather than having to change flights. So I fly BA most of the time.

So I'm a fan of the BA mobile boarding pass. It's quick, simple and like KLM's version, it works. But just compare the two airline's version of the mobile boarding pass experience.

KLM has taken a very low barrier to entry approach; their version works with pretty much any phone capable of either receiving an MMS text message or capable of receiving a URL to the boarding pass which can then be downloaded over the phone's data connection. That's it. If you're flying KLM and have a smart phone you can use KLM's mobile boarding pass. If you have a feature phone, you may still be able to use KLM's mobile boarding pass as basic smartphone functionality gradually gets introduced to the feature phone market.

BA Mobile Boarding Pass

British Airways has taken a somewhat different approach. You can only use the mobile boarding pass on an iPhone or on a Blackberry (though an Android version is promised soon). If you have a handset from another manufacturer or another phone OS then you can't use the service. Even if you have one of the approved handsets the service is still only available to passengers who are members of BA's Executive Club frequent flyer program. If you don't fly that often or don't want the possibility for more junk mail through your mailbox, then you can't use the service.

I'm still a fan of BA's mobile boarding pass, even though it's only available on short hail flights to Europe at the time of writing. BA may state that "the days of pockets full of paper are nearly over", but only for a very small percentage of their passengers who have the right phone and who are Executive Club members ... and that seems to be missing the whole point about why you'd actually want and use a mobile boarding pass, which is to reduce the amount of paper you need to carry and offer the service to the widest number of passengers you can.

Update: 17/11/10 - the Android version of the BA mobile app just updated itself on my Nexus One and now contains support for mobile boarding passes.

Flight Safe Mode; The Sequel

This is mercifully brief follow up to my previous post on British Airways proscriptions on enabling flight safe mode on your mobile phone and hails jointly from the departments of "be careful what you ask for, it might come true" and "they didn't really mean to say that ... did they?" ...

On this morning's flight from London Heathrow to Berlin's Tegel the usual flight safety announcement was made, but with a couple of significant, if contradictory, changes.

Takeoff!

"All electrical devices should be switched off during take off, landing and when the engines are running, some devices may be used after take off, please see High Life magazine for more information. If your mobile phone has a flight safe mode, it should be enabled now, before switching off the device and ensuring it is stowed in an overhead locker".

We'll leave aside for one moment that I'm pretty sure the engines are running during the flight so are we allowed to use flight safe enabled mobiles at all or not? But are we now not even trusted to have a switched off mobile phone in our pocket anymore and it has to be out of reach in the overhead locker?

Normal geo-related bloggage service will be resumed soon. Promise.

Cartoon Credit: Rob Cottingham at Noise To Signal

Flight Safe Mode

As part of the security and safety announcement that gets made each time you get onto a plane these days, there's invariably a bit which goes something like this ... "all electrical equipment should be switched off during taxiing, take off and landing and all devices with a flight safe mode should have this enabled now".

This makes sense; in the case of an emergency, the airline wants you concentrating on the emergency, not your laptop or your phone. It may also be the case that the phone may in some way interfere with the flight systems. Opinion on this is divided but the former seems a more realistic option than the latter.

The bit about the flight safe mode is certainly the case with Virgin Atlantic, Lufthansa and KLM, all of which I've flown with of recent. But British Airways seems to be taking this one step beyond, now insisting that not only do you switch things off but for mobiles, you enable flight safe mode and then switch it off as well into the bargain.

Broken

Isn't this taking things just a bit too far in the name of safety? It's called flight safe mode for a reason. It's safe. For flights. How much further will BA take this? "Please engage flight safe mode, switch the phone off, take the battery out and then, after placing the device on the floor, smash it with your heel and place the fragments in the bag provided taking care not to injure yourself".

Photo Credits: Camilo Rueda Lopez on Flickr.

Mental Note to Self

I'd been told that the lesser spotted flight upgrade does happen. But despite travelling the Heathrow to San Francisco route on British Airways roughly once every three months for the best part of four years, despite knowing at least three members of the BA cabin crew who put me down on the upgrade list (but no promises, it's at the discretion of the Captain you know) and despite frequently travelling with a colleague whose best friend is not only a pilot but a BA pilot, the elusive upgrade had never happened. Until today.

The BA Club World Experience

So what have I learnt from the experience? Firstly that Club World on BA is very, very, nice. Now nice is a much abused and cliched word but Club World is the sort of nice that makes me ponder what the rarified heights of First Class are like; nice staff, nice food, nice wine (Cline Cellars "Ancient Vines" 2007 Zinfandel plus three other red choices and four white choices if you're interested), just ... nice. Secondly that the seats (which put themselves into all sorts of configurations, from bolt upright to totally flat on your back and all points in between, at the touch of a button) are a world apart from the BA World Traveller Plus seats (AKA premium economy) that I'm used to.

On Board Power

But first and foremost, the lesson I've learnt is that Club World seats have power sockets. Proper power sockets. Power sockets that actually charge a laptop. Not an airline seat power outlet that needs a special adaptor, but a proper, plug it in, power socket. Which for some reason takes US power adaptors not UK. This could have meant disaster; good as the battery life is on my MacBook Pro it's not up to some 9 and a half hours of usage including PowerPoint deck wrangling and watching a movie or two. But luckily the day was saved by a nice lady in a BA uniform who rummaged in her personal luggage (which isn't a euphemism by the way) and loaned me her own UK/US adaptor for the duration of the flight. Now that's service in my book.

But mental note to self ... upgrades do happen so sticking a US power adaptor in your hand baggage next time is probably a good idea.

Written on BA 285, somewhere between LHR (51.47245, -0.45293) and SFO (37.61476, -122.39178) and posted from Chateau Bell, Campbell CA (37.2655445, -121.963743).