Passengers who have languished in catalog-browsing boredom on take-off and landing cheered Friday, when the FAA certified JetBlue and Delta as the first airlines to let you use approved portable electronic devices throughout the entire flight. Jet Blue made hay with a video celebrating their historic first flight under the new rules.
Why those two and not other airlines? Well, it turns out JetBlue and Delta happened to be on the FAA advisory panel that drew up the new regulations (including tests the airlines have to perform) in the first place. JetBlue Captain Chuck Cook even led one of its key subcommittees.
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So when the certification process was unveiled to the industry at large, no prizes for guessing which two airlines had done the precise tests necessary, and had their paperwork in order.
We're waiting to hear back from other airlines, but we did get a response from Virgin America — one of the more tech-savvy airlines, as this video shows — about when the company expects to have its testing done and approved by the FAA.
"We're in the process of applying through the new process and hope to implement the changes as soon as possible," Virgin America's Vice President of Brand Marketing Abby Lunardini told Mashable, "with the goal of having the change live in November — in time for the holidays."
Given that the company already runs its own wi-fi service on every single plane in the fleet, it is likely further down the testing checklist already than most. We'd put even money on Virgin being next to relax device rules — alongside American Airlines, which also happened to have its own engineering manager on that FAA panel.
Image: Virgin America