crashing the Virgin America RED terminal

NOTE: This no longer works.

I was able to force a crash of my RED terminal on a Virgin America flight (Airbus A320). Note that this does nothing but cause an inconvenience to yourself for reasons I will detail later - no other terminals are affected.

Attempting to play XMAHJONGG results in an error "not able to start the selected game." Without any user interaction, the RED front end will crash, and take X windows down with it. The terminals apprently run at linux runlevel 5, as the termination of X signals the kernel to reboot.

There are two things I thought interesting. First, during the reboot a prompt appears to press ENTER to activate the console. You can plug a USB keyboard into the RED terminal for easier typing and navigation; I did not have a keyboard with me as I travel light and thus did not test this.

Second: when the boot process gets to "Starting daemons...", the headphone jack on the armrest begins playing whatever the last radio station that was listened to at that seat, regardless of whether it was running or not at the time of the crash. You cannot change the volume or the radio channel. Worse, no audio from the RED system will be heard - my conjecture is that this problem will persist until the RED server that serves each bank of seats is rebooted, probably between flights. Thus, I would not recommend attempting to play XMAHJONGG on long flights, lest you forgot to pack some reading material or other amusement not related to the RED system.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• virgin
• america
• aviation
• in-flight
• entertainment
• linux
• crash

[prutyladyd07]

You're an idiot. Why would you want to "crash" any electronic device installed on an air craft? Don't understand why they allow dumbasses on planes.

[Glendale1901]

you need to think twice when you post a video with the words "crash" and "America" in the title. Seriously, you're a dumfuk

[JanitorMaster]

As long as you only crash the terminal ;-)

[TheStarwarsnerd3]

I thought you were supposed to turn off your cameras and other electronics during the flight.

[ronstrout]

This video is old and no longer valid. Don't waste your time.

[MattLoaf123]

He was on a plane.  What could he do?

[javelinxd44]

Great, but I would rather use it then crash it. Doing it at the end of the flight would be better.

[born2shine4ever]

you guys are idiots! get a fucking life. loosers

[DYLAV8R]

lol i did that to a jet blue and a continental ife, fortunately i did it at the end of the flights. on the jetblue flight, i crashed 5 rows of the Ife screens. it was funne

[homemadejam2006]

Hahaha, nice one mate (y)