Well I got to fly the A330 again – wonderful. But it has a problem where too many people are trying to press their keys at the same time and the response gets really slow.
My guess is that there is a slow network that keystrokes are sent across. In a steady state there are probably only 10-20 keys per second. But when the whole plane is trying to fire up their screens unsuccessfully and pounding on the keys – it probably gets to 200-300 keypresses per second – the whole thing slows down – the keystrokes seem to queue so perhaps TCP/IP is involved.
This is interesting because game usage creates a LOT of keypresses. This may limit the number of games which work effectively on the A330 – a whole plant full of kids doing FPS will be very unsatisfactory…
I talked to a friend David Tomanek and he said that he was on a A330 flight when they first came out and they had some technical problem and the Linux logo came up on the screens – pretty cool.