Oprah Skypes the world: 37,000 feet up in a Virgin America plane, 60 ft. below in a submarine, down in Antarctica and beyond

Set your TiVos and DVR. Oprah’s Thursday (May 21) show, called “Where the Skype Are You?” is being touted as an extreme adventure. Follow Oprah as she Skypes the world — doing video chats with people all over the globe including Antarctica, near the North Pole and even hosts the first ever Skype-enabled in-flight wine tasting, where Virgin America guests swirled, sniffed and sipped right along with her from the skies.

This comes as Virgin America announces that they are the first airline to provide fleet-wide Gogo In-flight Internet service on every one of their 100 daily flights. Sure, they only have 28 planes compared with Delta’s 1,000 planes — but they did beat even their own goal of going fleet-wide by summer. Air Tran came close to holding the title, announcing that they were going to offer Wi-Fi on all 136 of their jets by this summer.

So who is the lucky person that gets to talk to Oprah from 37,000 feet up in the air? It’s Mandalay “Mandy” Roberts, one of the Virgin America stewardesses that they call “in-flight teammates”. Tune in tomorrow (Channel 7-KABC at 3 p.m. in Los Angeles) to see where else Oprah travels via Skype. Here’s the link to check your local listings for what time the program will air in your area.

– Jen Leo, Los Angeles Times Travel & Deal blogger

[Photo: Virgin America]

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This entry was posted on Thursday, May 21, 2009 at 9:06 am by Jen Leo and is filed under Airline travel, Celebrity, Global, News, Tips & Advice, Travel Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.