The future of airline magazines

It occurred to me of late that the future of airline magazines may be coming to an end.

I take on average a minimum of 4 flights per week and haven’t touched an airline magazine for such a long time I cannot remember. One of the biggest factors would be that devices are allowed to be in use for both take off and landing as long as they are in airplane mode. The majority of passengers will either read email, text, play games or continue to start and stop miscellaneous applications on their phone. If they happen to have a tablet device they may read the newspaper, read a book or process through RSS feeds.

My behavior on planes now is to do the latter (i.e. reading on my tablet). Given the events in my life it is the one time that I’m able to catch-up on news, current affairs and my never ending list of books to get through. Once in-flight I’ll get out the laptop and do work.

The next biggest factor is the continued introduction of in-flight entertainment and Internet access. Not all planes have individual entertainment devices for each passenger however the number is growing every year. Furthermore Internet WiFi is also enabled on a lot of domestic flights in the US. WiFi isn’t something I use on flights as I like to be disconnected in order to focus and process through work. In saying that, I recently was on a flight to Portland Oregon where I connected to the plane’s WIFI and watch movies streamed by United’s entertainment system. Pretty cool!

All of this to me are big signs that paper publications on flights will diminish at some point of time in the future. The questions is when….