Dougal MacPherson sent in a photo of a menu from a recent Qantas flight he took from Melbourne to New Zealand. At the bottom of the menu, there is a “journey planner” timeline that shows passengers when they will be served meals, receive immigration documents, etc. It’s a creative way to set in-flight expectations.
JF
on 10 May 07Oh that’s pretty neat.
Noah Everett
on 10 May 07I’m sold just because they have ice cream…forget the meal just give me double the ice cream.
Benjy
on 10 May 07That’s neat, but some sort of time reference would be nice, though.
While maybe not as critical on a shorter Melbourne – NZ flight, it could be really useful when flying from the U.S. to Australia. Is that 3 hours or 5 hours between arrival documents and meal? Is there time to get a good block of sleep there? Or do I want to notify the stewardess that I want to bypass the meal in order to sleep longer?
Paul
on 10 May 07I think the beauty of it is that there is no fixed time layout. It’s all about rough estimates. I can surmise that I’m getting my ice cream a bit before the halfway point. I don’t really need to know that’s 2.5 hours in to a 5 hour flight.
In addition, this means that one document can be used for multiple flights. No need to customize for each and every flight, which will vary in length.
Great find.
JF
on 10 May 07Exact times don’t matter. You’re on the plane. You can’t go anywhere else.
Relative durations are simpler and also reduce expectations of everything happening exactly on time.
If the plane takes off late, for example, the entire timeline is botched. Further, you have to print separate cards for separate flights—not cost effective or necessary. And then you have the issue of passing over a lot of time zones on long flights. Specificity sounds like a nightmare to me. Roughly is good enough.
Eric Mueller, Themepark
on 10 May 07I disagree that time doesn’t matter on a flight—I want relative times so I know if I can catch a nap between documents and the meal… or if I skip the meal, how much time I could have between documents and ice cream.
Plus, maybe I’m the only one, but often I don’t know the flying time for flights I’m on. I always find it strange that airline tickets and boarding passes have nearly every string of numbers known to mankind printing on them :-) but they don’t feature a clear, simple block of info:
Departure Time from New York: 2:00 PM Eastern Time Flight time: 5 hours, 15 minutes Arrival Time in Los Angeles: 7:00 PM Pacific Time Please note that all times are estimates and may change depending on how many ounces of liquids your fellow passengers may have brought aboard.somethin’ like that :-)
E
Benjy
on 10 May 07I didn’t mean exact times as in “6:30 – Meal” but instead something that would designate that the forms are handed out 1 hour into the flight, the meal is served 6 hours into the flight, etc. I’m sure that many people would like to know the time windows between certain components of service on the flight.
Mike
on 10 May 07Seems strange that “Drinks and snacks available throughout your flight” appears about 66% into the journey. Shouldn’t it be near the front of the timeline?
Sedam
on 10 May 07The timeline idea is a very good one!
I agree with both JK and Eric Mueller… the times can not be printed on the brochures since that could soon become very costly.
However, considering the fact that one will not receive so many meals unless they were in a long-haul type of a flight, this menu may be shown in the video screens available in such flights….along with the timelines.
In this case the times could be entered “on the fly” (no pun intended), as well as have a visual indicator for the “current time” in that timeline.
Dougal MacPherson
on 10 May 07The flight was only around 3 hours, and the timeline as the document suggests wasn’t extremely accurate. However I don’t recall seeing discrete times on any other airlines journey planner.
I’d imagine that airlines would be reluctant, as then people would what to know why their meals are running 15min late.
I thought it was a nice way to present of the order of “proceedings” for the flight.
Dave Rosen
on 11 May 07I’m glad they clarified that – I was thinking the ice cream was going to come once we arrived.
Flights are just way to unpredictable to even map it out to this degree I think.
kangarool
on 11 May 07Legitimate, non-snarky question: why is this “good” at all? I actually would react negatively in that I’d feel it’s quite patronising indeed even infantilising…whether MEL-AUK or SYD-LAX, I’m aware of what 4 or 16 hours passage of time feels like… I also know that I get a meal or meals on flights, and bits in between.
I really can’t quite grasp why this was even thought of … I’m sure there’s a study showing it cuts questions from the average passenger to air crew in half or something … but then good god who is the average passenger if they feel compelled to ask “Do i get ice cream?? When’s it coming??
And even if I were that kind of average passenger, mightn’t the inclusion of that timeline compel me to ask “how much longer til this stage??” when otherwise, if i were ignorant of ice cream or whatever being served, i might not have thought to ask?
don’t get it. fire away, everyone..
Richard
on 11 May 07It’s useful to know that there will be service at intervals and what they will be; if one carried one’s own food on board one might not want to eat it just before or during the ice cream service. I think any attempt to make flights more predictable is useful and how it’s done is an interesting design problem.
However, on longer flights I find the GPS/flight info that runs on one of the video channels much more useful. One sees the entire route, time traveled, time until landing, and other information that can help one plan sleep, movie, eating times.
Of course this has nothing to do with the service times on the plane one is on, that’s a separate timeline that is controlled by the service folks and influenced by many things including turbulence which might keep the food cart out of the aisle.
Ben
on 11 May 07kangarool – I get your point – it’s not a tremendously useful addition to the flying experience, but I think it’s a nice touch.
I don’t see how it can be infantilising though – it’s only describing what’s going to happen anyway. If this graphic is infantilising, then so is the process of providing services at fixed intervals.
If you can accept that in order to allow the provision of these services to run smoothly, cabin staff need to “patronise” in so much as they treat everyone like an assembled class of infants, handing out meals in unison etc, then you can’t really see this timeline as being anything other than informational, since it doesn’t increase the existing level of infantilisation (go, new word machine, go!) inherent in the system.
On the topic of displaying times on the timeline. Obviously absolute times (main meal at 17:30) is pointless for the reasons pointed out earlier (print & logistics costs, and innacuracies due to flight delays). I think that proportional times could work (main meal 2hrs in), but it’d probably just clutter things up. The distances along the line between services should serve as a good enough guide to timing.
Benjy
on 11 May 07I just took another look at the blown up version of the image, and realized that there actually are hashmarks along the bottom of the timeline that seem to be in 15 minute incriments, given that there were 12 sections and Doug said it was a 3 hour flight. That’s pretty much what I was thinking when I made my earlier comment. They’re a little hard to see in the photo, but I’m sure they’re more visible on the actual document.
Benjy
on 11 May 07Doh! Forgot to close the italics tag.
Darrel
on 11 May 07Ice Cream!? On a plane!? Australian’s fly in some some weird alternative universe where airlines actually provide some basic customer comforts!
cabbage guy
on 11 May 07ok
i like that paper, but it is bit messy
Luke Freeman
on 12 May 07I noticed these on my Quantas flights recently… It was quite a plesent surprise :D
This discussion is closed.