After all my trouble with air travel, I thought I should add some positive views here. And they all turned to be around the iPad, so here they go.

The iPad is a better inflight entertainment system because…

• The touchscreen actually works. And when you touch it, you don’t disturb the person sleeping in the seat in front of yours.
• It’s lightweight.
• The captain cannot interrupt your movie or your picture to tell you some useless facts about the temperature outside or the altitude.
• You get to choose the music and the videos that you want to watch. You should just remember to get them prior to boarding, of course.
• You also get to choose the games you want to play. The choice of games is much larger, and it’s called App Store.
• You can even read newspapers, books, magazines, in the same screen. Reading the latest issue of the Economist on my iPad is priceless. It’s good to avoid being limited to the “in-flight” magazine provided by the airline (“your free copy!”), which tends to be quite lame, no matter which airline we’re talking about.
• You can answer e-mails while you fly (for the moment you cannot sent them, unless you fly in some airline that has a wifi network, and as far as I know, there are only a few with such a feature.)
• You could write a novel in iA Writer or Ommwriter for iPad, for that matter, all while you listen to Liszt’s “Evening Harmony in D Flat Major”. Or you could prepare a blog post, like this one.
• Coupled with noise-cancelling headphones, the quality of sound is years-light ahead of what those crummy airline headphones are able to provide.
• The battery. A whole 10-hour flight on a single charge is absolutely possible.

‘Nuff said.