JetBlue Flight Review

 I flew jet Blue for the first time last week. After hearing about them more than 5 years ago, I truly thought they brought whole new game to the flying industry with personal TV screens for everyone and nice comfortable seats. I guess my expectations were too high. Although the seat's were comfortable and the flight was not jam packed with people (like my previous southwest flights have been), the lack of free stuff provided and low audio/video quality on the TV screen really was not impressive.

    Each seat has a small LCD screen for each passenger. It provides a dozen channels on Direct TV and an assortment of categories on XM radio. The Video quality of the Direct TV was nothing impressive, far below HD quality. Although it is in an airplane, so what would you expect. I ended up spending most of my time listening to the XM radio. I was unable to find a good solid XM station, so I ended up flipping channels alot. I did happen to find a cool song by my friends brothers band: The Limousines. The song was Internet Killed The Video Star. The Given controller on the arm rest was a little compact to use. It made it a little hard to scroll through the menu, but it worked. One annoying feature of using all this electronic equipment was when ever there was an announcement over the intercom system (either by the flight attendant or the Captain), the headphones would give an annoying buzz sound, rather than just acting as a speaker for the announcement directly. Also, they don't provide headphones for free, but rather charge 2 dollars. Luckily I brought some iPhone buds!

 Another aspect of the flight I wasn't particularly impressed with was the free goodies! Usually I look forward to a nice glass of OJ and some peanuts, on a typical southwest flight. However, this flight left me disappointed with a tiny can of fake OJ (with no ice) and a bag of 5 small cookies (I ate one, from the picture shown below). 

  So overall the flight was fine. For being JetBlue I was expecting something more, as I have always had high hopes that they did things differently. And I guess they do, but maybe not in the best way. I flew them because they offered a cheep flight from Long Beach to Oakland for only $49 with a weeks notice. A couple bucks cheeper than a southwest flight and alot cheaper than anything available on Kayak or Farecaster. Remember to check JetBlue and Southwest before taking Kayak as the official cheapest price. If you look at other peoples reviews they seam to enjoy their experience. As for the TV entertainment, I found it a little distracting and it really cut back on my normal reading time on a plane. I would imagine it also makes people less social as they have a handful of entertainment at their finger tips.