Getting live news – case in point from Boeing 787 first flight

The live coverage for a significant event of the Boeing's first Dreamliner flight on December 15, 2009 proved to be extremely difficult to get. The “morning front page” news has become obsolete as we strive to know what is happening “right this very moment”. The twitter updates, the phones that notify us when a new e-mail arrives, the omnipresent Wi-Fi make us always-connected nation demand the news coverage to be delivered instantly or else it quickly falls off our overworked brains that cannot remember more than a 20 second news snippet. And yes, Twitter is not helping here. Today we discuss a usability case trying to get online news coverage for a relatively large news event that is known in advance.

Today was a significant day for an aviation industry – the new jetliner first flight. Despite news sources chanting a phrase “more than two years late”, the significance of the event does not become any less remarkable. Many people have expected this event to occur today, over 20 thousand Boeing employees waited outside in the rain for this moment of truth that lasted for several hours. The folks that were not lucky to be on the field had to resort to a live coverage elsewhere. Indeed, with all high speed networking everywhere why expect anything less than an instant coverage?

The event was not unexpected by all means and the google.com/trends proves the point. Below are the “hot topics”:

Hot Topics! (USA)
1. Boeing 787 test flight

So, Boeing made it to the top of the list today. Even more out of the 10 “Hot Searches” today news related to Boeing was in three:
1. 787 landing
2. 787 first flight video
3. Dreamliner landing

The basic search on Google for “boeing 787 live feed” had no links for actual live feed of the event. Search results need to mature and the algorithm needs to figure out that a phrase on a page “live feeds are not working” should not show up under the initial query. But it does.

By the way, Microsoft’s Bing results were not better – there were no links to the actual live feed on the first page and many of the front page articles were not even the recent ones. Google’s result showing a scrolling window feed of some news right on the front page is a significant improvement over Bing’s interface.


Many links suggest checking the official site at http://787firstflight.newairplane.com/, but the site had a an image of an airplane with a status “Welcome to the live webcast…”.


It doesn’t take a usability expert to figure out that sliding a gray bar from the right to the left is not the most intuitive way to show the status of the first flight. And yes, there was no other way to do it more intuitively that I could see, no keyboard shortcut worked either.

This is the message that would be scrolling once the sliding process would be complete:

The scrolling message “Estimated landing 1:22 P.M. PST” was changed three times during the first flight.

There were some pleasant surprises regarding the available data. Site http://flightaware.com/ offered a plotted path of the Boeing 787 flight in real time. Availability of the track log with GPS coordinates, altitude, changes is quite impressive. This is what the screen looked during the flight:


A great video feed was provided by http://kirotv.com/. The video was shot from a chopper that had a great point of view nearby.

However, even here, the video footage was amazing but the commentary was left to be desired. Most of the time there was silence, with some rather random conversations that you could barely hear only one side.

Twitter aggregation is still not mature enough to follow the actual development. Going through dozens of similar messages that “787 landed” without any seeming way to filter duplicates seems to be very time consuming to consider newsworthy.

The lessons from the day are the following:

1. The search technology is not mature enough to provide near-instant results in the search results.

2. Search cannot distinguish “live feed not available on the page” from the “live feed” in the search results.

3. Twitter tends to become rather chatty with many similar messages during a popular event.

4. Boeing site provided rather disappointing experience during such an exciting event. Usability horrors aside to having no visual clues to slide a square to reveal messages from the control room, having only a couple updates to that was simply not enough to call it a live feed. Besides, no images were shown for the actual flight test on the Boeing site.

Seeing a new airplane fly was exciting. Seeing messages from Airbus to congratulate Boeing on the achievement was heart-warming. And I will remain hopeful that one day the search technology will continue to evolve and be useful for covering live events.