Scoot - the world's longest virtual flight

Scoot - the world's longest virtual flight

When the carrier decided to drum up some publicity by putting on a “virtual flight” for customers with smartphones, it might have expected the process to go without a hitch.

Sadly their social media campaign, which involved inviting passengers to ‘board’ their virtual flight on their smart phone, suffered a series of technical glitches meaning that 5,000 of the registered competitors were unable to log into the app before the competition started, meaning only 2,000 people managed to participate in the campaign, even after delaying the start by 15 minutes.

The concept was based on a ‘last-man standing’ concept, by inviting participants to board a virtual flight, and remain onboard by tapping a button every minute for as long as they could. The winner was awarded SGD20,000 cash and free flights for a year.

The problems, which included entrants being dropped unexpectedly from the app, led to escalating animosity towards Scoot, which received more than 1,000 comments on the issue on its Facebook page.

Despite the hiccups, Mr Mohammed Firdaus Ismani, 29, outlasted more than 2,000 other contenders - by tapping on the button for a total of 18 hours - to win the grand prize of $20,000 and a year’s worth of flights to any Scoot destination.

Scoot sent out a lengthy email to all participants apologising and explaining what went wrong. The airline is set to run the competition again, once they have the app up and running again.