Currently two hours from landing in SF after a long trans pacific flight. Why the hell would an international airline provide in flight wifi on a long haul international flight and then run it through the great firewall? Every single passenger, even the Chinese ones will have full unfettered internet access as soon as we land. Obviously they are forced to, but what a pointless petty requirement. It doesn’t stop any of the Chinese looking at whatever they want when we land and just pisses off all the international customers who might possibly have booked a business class flight with you assuming they could actually use the inflight wifi for something useful.
Gmail, Facebook, LINE, Dropbox, Slack, all blocked, all of which are essential for me to get anything done (I advertise on facebook and manage my company pages).
Oh and then your nice invitation to the business class lounge in Shanghai says “to maintain peace and quiet no boarding announcements will be made in the lounge”, its written right there on the invite. So why the hell is your staff screaming out every single flight boarding 10 times in both mandarin and english? Even when there is clearly no one from that flight in the lounge? (they check our boarding passes so they know what flights people are on). And then when I complain showing them the writing on the invite they just say it’s their jobs and they have to do it. No you don’t there is frigging 10 tv’s showing all the boarding times all around the lounge.
Yeah yeah shouldn’t have flown on a Chinese airline, and should have got a VPN. Chinese airlines have been ok for shorter flights around asia five or six hours, they are using Airbuses and Boeing, safety is not really a concern, so I thought I’d give long it a try… Well I’ll never use them for long haul again even if it’s by far the lowest price.
PS Is this a record, an in flight pitting of the airline I’m on?
Heh, either that or I’ll get a China Eastern rep meet me at the gate saying “we’re very sorry about your issues Sir and we’ll try harder” China doesn’t seem to make any effort to stop foreigners who live in China using a VPN to get around the firewall so I’m relatively safe.
You know what’s not banned in China? Yahoo, MySpace and Bing, it’s like some bizarre nightmare alternate history version of the internet. Oh and the dope is obviously not banned, come on guys, try harder!
Nope… youtube is also blocked in China. It’s trivial to get around with a VPN, but the point is they can tell who is using a VPN and if you’re a foreigner it’s fine, but if a Chinese national uses a VPN even though they can’t tell what you are looking at , they will come knocking and make them answer some hard questions.
I worked in China for about 8 years, and had to fly China Eastern often.
The flights were often hours late departing, had unannounced gate changes, and
the staff obviously didn’t care.
On all of their domestic flights, and on some international flights you are not allowed to use your phone for the entire flight. Not even on “flight mode”.
Many of their flights are cheaper, but they do make you pay for it with lousy food and surly staff.
I’m on the return flight , once again blocked from doing anything useful using their onboard wifi. Just wanted to bump this to make sure others see to never be tempted to fly with this miserable company.
China doesn’t seem to make any effort to stop foreigners who live in China using a VPN to get around the firewall so I’m relatively safe.