There’s nothing more frustrating than discovering that the entertainment system on your flight, or even worse, at your seat, doesn’t work. You’ve read the in-flight magazine, you’ve checked out the films that are supposed to be playing and you’ve waited patiently until you’ve reached cruising height and the fasten-seatbelts light has been extinguished.

Yet when a member of the cabin crew tells you that they are about to turn on the entertainment system, your screen fails to flicker into life, or just flickers, or the headphones don’t work, or five minutes into each film it fast-forwards to the end, stopping only long enough to give away the plot.

Perhaps you are one of those who “never” watches in-flight entertainment (IFE). If so, you are probably an English graduate addicted to reading novels, or a workaholic, or someone who suffers from borderline narcolepsy and who uses every available moment you are not actually on your feet to sleep. But for most people, IFE is a pleasant way of passing at least a proportion of the flight, and for those with children, it borders on a life-and-death necessity.

In-flight entertainment isn’t a new phenomenon. It started as a pile of newspapers and magazines, among which Business Traveller, when it first launched in 1976, was a frontrunner. In those heady days, reading a free magazine provided by the airline was all part of the service, which was lucky, because short of an impromptu  puppet show by the crew, that was all the entertainment on offer.

As technology improved, the provision of a central screen showing a film was quickly supplanted by overhead monitors, supplied from a videotape. In fact, many airlines today haven’t progressed from this point, but those which have make sure you know about it.

IFE has now moved to the point where airlines see it as a differentiator. They market the provision of IFE, the choice of movies, games and audio choice on that IFE, the ability to stop and start the content, (known as “audio and video on demand”, or AVOD), to such an extent that research shows that passengers regard it as the second most popular in-flight activity, after sleep.

Yet marketing such services also means that airlines are managing expectations upwards, and that can bring problems, particularly when the service is not available. Ten years ago, here at Business Traveller we never received letters complaining about broken IFE systems. Now we do. And linked to these complaints is travellers’ amazement that airlines don’t seem to take the matter as seriously as the travellers, at least when things go wrong. So why is this? And why do systems go wrong?

Firstly, although they will never admit it, IFE isn’t the most important thing to an airline. More important is ensuring your flight takes off and lands safely, on time and at the right airport, preferably with your bags on board (it’s expensive arranging a later rendezvous) – and then there are the smaller matters of making sure the seats work and the food arrives hot and doesn’t poison you.

Added to that, IFE is horrendously expensive and doesn’t directly provide any revenue. A system today might cost as much as US$4 million and cost the same again for upkeep during the course of its five or seven-year life. It is the second most expensive thing on the aircraft (the first is the engines, which are non-negotiable).

Why is it so expensive? Unlike consumer electronics, anything that goes onto an aircraft has to be rigorously tested and go through an approval process. It also has to be hard-wearing, not least because many passengers become infants the moment they get on board and treat the systems like toys that will absorb any amount of abuse.

Today, the supply of new in-flight entertainment systems is dominated by two providers: Panasonic and Thales Avionics. It is to companies such as these that ultimately questions about reliability have to be directed. Stuart Dunleavy, vice president media services at Thales, points out that all systems work when they are installed on an aircraft. It’s how they are subsequently maintained that makes the difference. “Service and support is critically important,” he says.

Thales offers a number of different support tiers to airlines. “At the most basic level we simply repair our own product if it goes wrong, so an airline can send a display, for instance, back to us and we would repair it either under warranty or for payment.”

Dunleavy says that there is also a “full service where we meet and greet every aircraft”. As you would expect, this has a benefit to passengers: “It’s at the higher level of service that you get an overall higher performance for that equipment, since it’s what we specialise in and we have all the spares ready to fix the product at the end of every flight.”

Airlines which have taken this approach with the new Thales IFE product and who have installed it in new aircraft, are currently doing so or are retrofitting existing aircraft include Etihad, Kingfisher Airlines, Air India, Korean Air and Oman Air, as well as LAN Chile and Air Canada. The more basic approach on the other hand can lead to an airline flying when a seat’s IFE is not properly working, or even five or six seats are not working, which in the words of Dunleavy “…can have an impact on customer satisfaction”.

To take an airline closer to home, British Airways is completing the installation of a new AVOD system on its B777 fleet, having already installed it across the whole of its B747-400 fleet. The system is an older one than those currently being offered by Panasonic and Thales, and is made by Rockwell Collins.

Both from experience and anecdotally, the system has been problematic. In the early months, it frequently had to be rebooted, and a member of flight crew on a recent BA long-haul trip (August 2008) told me that on the outbound sector they had had to shut down the entire system because so many seats needed “resetting”.

The observation was borne out on another recent flight when we were given detailed instructions prior to the commencement of the IFE. These involved instructing passengers in all cabins to let the system start before pressing the screen, and if a screen was not working, to allow the crew to reset the screen which would take 10 minutes. If during that 10 minutes the passenger touched the screen, it might knock the system out altogether, meaning they wouldn’t have any entertainment at all. It all had the air of being the result of hard-won experience by the crew.

All of this would be understandable if the system was in its early roll-out, but it has been around for well over 18 months. I asked British Airways for their observations. A spokesperson for BA said: “We began the roll-out of the Rockwell Collins audio/video on demand (AVOD) system in 2006. AVOD is now performing extremely well. It is at its best level yet and is significantly better than the previous system we had on board.

“We did experience some initial teething troubles with the system as we rolled it out. The issues were related to the process of loading content. We took a number of measures to stabilise the system whilst we identified a long-term solution with the system provider, Rockwell Collins. We’ve made changes to the way we load content and have recently completed a new software update. We have seen significant improvements as a result and will continue to work with Rockwell Collins to ensure the system remains robust.”

Rockwell Collins is well known for its Airshow Moving Map product, which is on more than 130 airlines worldwide, even those which don’t use its full IFE solution. The company has a number of products, including the TES [total-entertainment system] which is on BA. Two years ago, however, the company took the business decision to move away from developing IFE systems for wide-bodied aircraft, although Matthias Walther, principal marketing manager for the company, says: “We will continue to support our existing customer base.” He also confirms that the system will be installed on BA’s B777-200 and B777-300 fleet.

So what happens when it doesn’t work? Well, there are two relationships, those between the airline and the passenger, and the airline and the IFE supplier. In the first case, as British Airways puts it: “If an individual’s programming is affected, the cabin crew will do all possible to re-set it and, if this fails, to re-accommodate the customer in another seat.”

As far as the relationship between the airline and IFE supplier goes, a certain number of broken systems is to be expected – or as Alan Pellegrini, general manager of Thales’ in-flight entertainment business, puts it, the contract between the two will specify “a degree of degradation”. So if a performance level of 98 seats out of 100 working is mentioned in the contract, then everyone considers this to be acceptable.

Pellegrini, however, points out that airlines are responsible for the onboard service. “Many problems aren’t system-related and airlines have to maintain the product. Things will get broken and they can be replaced by being shipped back to us. But if it gets to the point that 10 seats aren’t working, then you’ll have a lot of unhappy passengers. The best systems are ones where we are paid for support. If you do it yourself, we can train your staff, but you still have to keep on top of the situation.”

It’s here that the problem occurs. Pellegrini explicitly states: “The recurring costs of maintaining an IFE system will exceed its initial cost. Airlines need to understand that.”

Regular travellers may be aware that airlines frequently fly with known faults. IFE is regarded by the airline as a “forgiveable fault”, but it’s not forgivable to a passenger since they’ve paid for the seat and they want it to work. So what can you do if your IFE doesn’t work, despite the best efforts of the crew, and there’s no seat to swap to? Not much, seems to be the answer. Read a book, and write a letter when you get home. Airlines will only say that such matters are dealt with on a case-by-case basis.

The future of IFE

Imagine booking a low-cost flight, and being given a list of recent Hollywood releases you can “Pay to View” during your flight. If you’d boarded been asked for payment after boarding the aircraft, you might have had second thoughts, but a month or so beforehand, having just found an affordable flight, the extra £5 seems a snip.

The transaction takes place on the internet at the same time as you book your flight, you are given a code on your reservation, and on the day of your flight, once you take off, you key that code into the screen in front of you and watch the film in peace. Such advances are already technically possible (pictured below is Air Asia X’s pay-per-, as are adverts targeted at you on the basis of your gender.

Having some form of e-commerce function on board also allows you to buy duty free without having to wait for the cabin staff to roll the trolley up and down the aisle. Instead, you could order and pay for it online beforehand, and have it delivered to you either in-flight or once you arrive at your destination.

Then there’s internet and live TV (already available on many flights), as well as SMS and text-messaging using Blackberries and of course mobile phones (already available on several airlines – Emirates, Air France, Qantas and Ryanair, to name the first few).