Home Forums Peripherals & Multimedia Peripherals Aircraft Power

Does an Airbus 320 count as a peripheral device?

If so, here's the issue. One of my daughters, currently en route, called from an airport stopover to say that her MacBook is not powering up from the aircraft A/C outlet using her external power supply. It worked fine in the airport waiting rooms but not on board.

I suggested that, once airborne again she should look around and see if anyone else is using the Airbus A/C, but I won't have any news until she lands again. Anyone else had problems with power on aircraft?

Her machine is an early Macbook (June 2006) 1.83GHz Intel Core Duo.

ryck

Airline power ports vary from AC/110V to DC/15V, with the latter supplying only up to 75W. In addition, you may need special adapters to be able to use these ports. Your daughter may have had a DC* port providing insufficient juice to power her laptop. In my experience, power port availability has been a crapshoot, and even when one’s there, it’s often barely enough to run off of but it won’t charge a battery (assuming that’s even allowed).

*) You mentioned an AC port, and if that’s correct it must have been switched off. Been there, had that.

Thanks for the link. It's quite amazing.

A person might expect that power output could vary from aircraft to aircraft, but who would guess there would be so many differences within a single aircraft? Whatever happened to standards?

Sometimes you can only scratch your head and keep on walking.

About the AC - I'm assuming she had an AC outlet from her description - two prongs and a ground.

ryck

But that's the wonderful thing about Standards, there's just so many to choose from!