In-seat power

On recent flights with VS in PE I have tried to use the power socket only to find it would not work. In advance of my forthcoming trip to NYC in UC, I thought I would check my Empower plug to see if it was faulty but all the connections are sound and the continuity is ok.

This leads me to question if the seat sockets are live at all times or do you have to request them to be switched on?

So far as I am aware, the sockets are permanently live.

I have had to ask for them to be activated before, they are turned off for take off and landing and sometines the crew forget to reactivate them

[mitchja]

You can see when the Empower sockets are on as there's a green LED that lights up next to them.

I believe they do have to be switched on, and it's usually at the same time as the IFE is switched on.

I have finally found the reason for my Empower adaptor not working. The adaptor I bought off Ebay only had two small pins....there should also be two thicker ones too. DOH!!!

Now purchased a new one from Maplin today so looking forward to trying it out on my upcoming VS400 flight.

For those interested, the details of the adapter can be found here.
http://www.maplin.co.uk/empower-aircraf ... tor-543088

The in seat power has to be manually turned on and off by the crew after take off and before landing. If it isn't working, just ask the crew if it has been switched on. ii)

Thanks for the reply Tinks. However, with two pins missing there was no way it was going to work!!

As Tinks has said, the in-seat power does have to be turned on and off by the cabin crew. That said, I have been on flights when the green LED has been lit on boarding (& did not need to ask for the power to be turned on, so was presumably left on from the previous flight). And on the flip-side, when the green LED was lit but no power was flowing to either of our two seats, so there was a fault of some kind in the system, as resets of the in-seat power by the crew made no difference.