"BLAH Airlines" Takes Flight: Virgin America to Show Its Viral Six-Hour Spoof On Real-Life Flights
Virgin America’s viral “BLAH Airlines” video spoof will soon be available as in-flight entertainment — all six hours of it. (Virgin America)
Looking for a new way to entertain yourself on your next cross-country flight? Why not watch a nearly six-hour movie of a flight that’s (hopefully) worse than the one you’re on.
Virgin America confirms to Yahoo Travel that the airline will include its viral “BLAH Airlines” video as part of its on-demand in-flight entertainment.
The brilliantly surreal online spoof features a plane full of slack-jawed mannequins on a horrific flight from Newark to San Francisco on board “BLAH Airlines” — the fictitious inept airline Virgin America concocted for a new ad campaign (BLAH even has its own fake web, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram pages).
Virgin America’s “BLAH Airlines” spoof depicts mannequins on a cross-country flight from hell. It’s almost six hours long. (Virgin America)
This video depicts the flight in real time, so it’s six hours (5 hours, 46 minutes, 9 seconds to be exact) of airborne misery: a screaming baby, a hilariously incompetent flight crew (in an attempt to solve a lost luggage mystery, a flight attendant asks passengers, “Who here has a black, rectangular suitcase?”), and some guy in the next seat who drones on and on and on.
“You can have your wonderful Virgin America flight and also take the opportunity to watch this horrible flight experience on BLAH Airlines while on board,” Jon Gordon, Brand Art Director at Virgin America, tells Yahoo Travel. “That’ll highlight the stark difference between flying Virgin America and BLAH Airlines even more.”
WATCH: A much shorter peek at “BLAH Airlines”
Virgin hasn’t yet announced a date when the “BLAH Airlines” video will debut on its in-flight entertainment system. But when it does, watching a movie of a six-hour flight while you’re actually on a real-life six-hour flight will be the most meta flying experience ever.
And an awkward one, too. “Just watching the video is painful and that was the point,” Gordon says. “A lot of these airlines are very similar to BLAH airlines. It’s kind of the antithesis of Virgin America. And we created the movie to remind people that life’s too short to fly in a miserable airline.”
You’ll likely have this same look on your face after watching the hilariously awkward “BLAH Airlines” video. (Virgin America)
"BLAH Airlines” has already racked up more than half a million online views and won AdWeek’s “Commercial of the Week" survey. And in what’s become the new version of the Ice Bucket Challenge (without the charity), people are challenging themselves and others to watch the whole six-hour epic, from beginning to end.
"It’s sort of becoming a cult thing,” Gordon says of the marathon “BLAH” viewings. “On social media, people are saying ‘I loved it!’ and ‘I watched the entire thing!’ It’s been the greatest thing ever."
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Maybe a marathon in-flight “BLAH Airlines” viewing session can be just the thing to spice up your next flight. You can challenge your traveling companion or seatmates to a competition: you each fire up the “BLAH” video and the first person to look away, go to sleep, or go to the bathroom has to buy the next round of drinks. Or maybe it could become a communal, “Rocky Horror Picture Show”-type viewing experience. The possibilities are endless.
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"I hope we do get to see more of BLAH Airlines,” Gordon says. For a sequel, might we respectfully suggest that Virgin America’s corporate cousins, Virgin Australia, make a video spoofing a BLAH flight from Los Angeles to Sydney. That video would have to be 15 hours long.
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