Those Old US Airways Planes Kinda, Sorta Have Power Ports After All. Not Really
Many moons ago Doug Parker, Scott Kirby and the gang at US Airways went through a cleansing process where they threw off pretty much everything they could on their planes to save on weight (ultimately leading to fuel savings). They also chose not to install power ports on those older planes to save on weight.
I ended up on a US Airways A321 yesterday in seat 1A. I scored the last upgrade on a Wednesday afternoon flight on a not terribly popular route, which should also tell you how hard upgrades are to score nowadays.
I think that’s the first time I ever sat in 1A on one of those birds and I observed this at my feet.
Talk about old school power! That’s the closest you’re going to get to power ports in those older planes, and I imagine they’ll be in the fleet for a while longer.
All kidding aside, I think it’s almost a requirement that planes have power for customers nowadays considering the amount of people bringing devices onto planes. I’m thankful to get 6 or 7 hours of battery life out of my MacBook Pro and thus not need to play “power port lottery” on most of my flights.
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The airline that annoys me in this regard is Southwest. Brand new seats going into planes whose only IFE requires a personal electronic device (i.e. they stream TV/Film to your device through their Wifi), yet the new seats do not offer any power ports. If they still solely flew one hour intra-Texas hops it would be one thing, but they now have dozens of daily flights over 2,000 miles in length.
Ben, I do think it was a painful oversight/decision by Southwest not to install power in new planes. It’s a power hungry traveling world…..
I was on an American (old USAir) flight the other day that had cigarette lighter-style chargers on it!
Bryce, really???? AA has a bunch of old planes with those on them (MD-80s, for the most part now) but I don’t recall hearing of US Airways planes with those. Do you recall the aircraft type?
I could be wrong about it being a US Airways plane, but it definitely wasn’t nearly as large as an MD 80. It wasn’t a DASH-8…it was a regional carrier+craft though…hm. I REALLY don’t remember, but I do remember pointing it out to the passenger next to me, and we had a good laugh.
Route/date/time?
US was a leader in putting power on its Airbus fleet in the early 2000s (emPower proprietary plug, not cigs). And then ripped it all out to save money.
Yeah, I thought they made them all go away as well.
Hmm, I wonder what regional carrier of US is flying around with cig light adapters?
JetBlue has a similar plug in seat 1F on all planes.
Also note that it it 400Hz, not the traditional 50-60Hz outlet. That could end up frying whatever you plug in to it, though I’ve used them from time to time and had no issued.
Yeah, I wasn’t really comfortable plugging my laptop in, though if I was desperate for power I might have tried it.