The new 800 series plane features 3 bathrooms (as does the existing Air Tran 737s). This is the most important feature for this senior citezen when flying on five hour flights such as BWI/PHX. The present fleet has but one usable bathroom for 135 people, since the forward one is severly restricted by the paranoid rule of "no waiting" area, making it only useful for the most nimble.
Suggest replacing the aft galley on the older 737s with an additional bathroom.
Dick
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On feb 14 I was pleasently surprised to find the wi-fi available on flight on flight 1245 PHX/BWI. I have an Acer Aspire 8" notebook with a six hour battery, so i decided to give it a try. Found the cost to be five dollars, paid on line via credit card. I was able to check my e-mail right away. Could not get Explorer to work for about an hour. The flight attendent recycled the airborne equipment and I also recycled my laptop and it began to work. I am not very savvy on computer quirks but this seems to be a common problem with systems that require you to log on before access to the web is activated. Sending e-mail via web based mail (Mail2web) worked but was a problem with sending via outlook express and my home ISP. Got it also to work after fooling around with the send mail settings. The home page of the system has a flight progress feature, but I find flightaware.com a little more robust, displaying the wx, aviation chart and flight progress. Once I got it to work it was great. I e-mailed my son in St. Louis and exchanged messages in real time as we passed over his house. The flight was just under five hours, so my battery life was fine. As an electrical engineer and private pilot I think in seat power outlets would be too costly to justify. At 100 watts per seat, the load would be about 15 kilowatts, a serious load on the aircraft system. I think a fair price for any flight would be the price of a drink ticket or $4. Until all A/C are modified including the charge in the ticket is not practical.since the odds of getting a plane with a working system will be low for a while and low fares are one (of several) advantages you have over other airlines. My most frequent travel is PHX/BWI and I will use the service on that route but am not likely to use it on flights of under two hours.
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