Fractured movies sorted, says airline

Ed Sims

Air New Zealand believes it has solved the problems with the entertainment system in one of its newly refitted jumbo jets, but has threatened staff with losing their jobs if they speak out on the issue.

A single plane in the airline's jumbo fleet - registration NBW - was studied by engineers on Saturday as they hunted for the cause of recent trouble. Air New Zealand said the plane left for Los Angeles that night with a working entertainment system and no more problems had been reported.

Issues with NBW jumbo - the latest of the 747s to be refitted - were first raised by a senior flight-crew member, who said he was embarrassed at having to hand out $30 vouchers in compensation to passengers.

Air NZ initially denied any particular problem with the jumbo, but difficulties with it were confirmed by United States firm Rockwell Collins, which supplied the system.

An airline spokesman said some components in the system used to load new movies were found to be faulty.

In a staff memo circulated on Friday, Ed Sims, general manager, international airlines, warned staff about disclosing problems with the new system.

Since the start of this month, there had been a "small number of full aircraft failures" after a software download containing new movies.

Several staff members have told the Herald about problems with the new system.

Sims said if those who "had chosen to sabotage our efforts and those of their colleagues" by "feeding unauthorised and incorrect comments to the media" were identified, it would be treated as a serious breach of their employment contract.

The entertainment system is part of the airline's refit of its eight Boeing 747-400s, costing $20 million a plane.

The refit - which includes better seating - is an important step for Air NZ, which needed to update its aircraft interiors and entertainment systems or risk losing passengers to rivals.

Commenting on the problems with the entertainment system, the vice-president and general manager of Rockwell Collins passenger systems, Tommy Dodson, said from California that the NBW jumbo was thought to have been given a corrupted file containing the movies for this month.

When the individual screens were introduced in July, some seats had to be "reset". This had been fixed by a software update six weeks later.

"This one is kind of a one-off, the way it's acting now," said Dodson. "But the performance measured in seat availability and also in some of the passenger acceptance and the data that Air New Zealand's got back has been quite high."

Air NZ's share price has fallen in the past week, after hitting $1.36 on Wednesday, a price not seen since July last year.

It fell 5c yesterday, finishing the day at $1.28.

Stephen Wright, head of advisory at ASB Securities, said a generally negative day on the market and concerns about high oil prices could have caused the fall.