Wow, that’s really interesting news, especially about how much weight they save! I do like to read the magazines though, especially on short flights when you want that sort of ten-minute article to tide you over.

Some of the budget airlines have the right idea by not bringing on enough magazines for every passenger, just handing them out to the people who want them. I like EasyJet’s magazine because it has a short piece on every destination they fly to in every issue of the magazine, including information about how to get to the city from the airport. Very useful.

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Yeah, I’m with you on this – though I’ve always been surprised by easyJet’s magazine. It’s actually pretty good.

I’ve seen destination content on IFE before – I flew with Air New Zealand a while ago and there were a number of videos about NZ available on demand. On the same trip I interviewed Ed Sims from ANZ, and he said:

“In the past three months we’ve added another 200 hours of content to our in-flight entertainment. That’s a big customer plus, but it also reduces our need to carry magazines and newspapers on board.”

So there are other airlines thinking this way, which is encouraging.

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i don’t know about you, but i loved reading the SkyMall magazine. i can never believe all the crazy products they have in there. i suppose the airline-sponsored ones aren’t as good but i agree with others when they say that airport/local attractions info is useful.

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I never read flight magazines but the wife does.
I wouldn’t miss them if all of the airlines decided to remove them. I don’t agree that it’s a green reason why Emirates have done this though. I read this week that they have installed showers into their planes.

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@ Rohan – two showers on its one A380, yes.

Like any huge business, E’s motives won’t be entirely green – ditching magazines increases fuel economy and removes contract publishing fees from the airline’s costs, for instance – but to criticise them for two shower cubicles seems a bit much.

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Darren

Skymall is on most US domestic flights I have flown on. It does contain a lot of weird stuff that you would never buy otherwise. But it is worth a few laughs.

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@nick – Skymall is hours of inflight entertainment on US domestic. Only thing I look forward to. Food flaky (if you get any), service surely (if you get any), movie mediocre (if you get one) but the skymall is always entertaining. My favourite item – the personalised branding iron for putting your initials onto steaks before serving to mates at a bbq http://www.skymall.com/shopping/detail.htm?pid=69646908&c=
Hours of entertainment

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all it is, is a really clever publicity stunt for an airline to get some green points. at the end of the day, if a passenger is going to travel on an airline which has no inflight magazine what are they most likely to do ? buy some magazines at the airport to read on the plane, hence no weight saving ! inflight magazines do not weigh 2 kg each as they claim and most of them are printed on recycled paper.

as for all the ads and content in the inflight magazines, i think they’re quite relevant and quite often help you discover your destination far better than without.

i think some people just prefer to watch tv but personally i enjoy and get a lot out of inflight magazines and prefer that they stay … or at least turn into electronic versions of the same content.

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The flight magazines are usualy full of rubish anyway.

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I personally am not a big fan of travel magazines on most of the carriers. I travel around the world for Jet Set Life filming videos so I tend to have exposure to a lot of the major airline magazines (bad and good). I just bought an Amazon kindle that holds 400 books and is the size of a paper back. I’ve used it in a bunch of countries and it travels very well.

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Inflight mags often have some good articles in them, because they rely on freelancers who tend to know what they are writing about rather than staffies who have fallen asleep on the job or shills who are paid to boost some other idiotic destination.

I have written and photographed occasionally for the inflights and they were a good outlet until the Internet killed photography and writing by giving everyone who needed to see his/her name in lights a chance to do just that.

On the other hand, yes, there are statistics about how much fuel is saved with each kilo less…

That’s the idea behind arrival duty free (you order the stuff you want before boarding and pick it up on arrival) . What would really save fuel though is less flighing around for three days. I have friends who just fly somewhere because it’s cheap. For Pete’s sake!

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