Yeah, fine—a cheeky title for a blogpost, but appropriate: I started drafting it at 35,000 feet, aboard my first-ever Virgin America flight, en route to San Francisco for the weeklong marathon known as Oracle OpenWorld. (And, yes, it’s been sitting here in the drafts folder ever since. Have I mentioned I’m still grappling with the immediacy of blogging?)

The other staffers on this blog have a very different kind of fodder for their posts—dispatches from the road, backstories to their daily news pieces, interesting asides they come across while researching their pieces for the print magazine. But I tend to edit more than write these days—every word you read in CRM magazine each month or on destinationCRM.com every day passes under my bleary eyes, to the tune of about 50,000 words monthly. (Yes, we really are that prolific here.)

So my posts may touch on their writing from time to time, but I think I’m more likely to expound on subjects a bit more far afield—while hopefully maintaining a CRM-specific bent. I have the multitasking tendencies of an ADD-afflicted juggler, an insatiable appetite for information both relevant and random, and the blessing/curse of insomnia. (Depending on whom you ask, that combo’s either a creative cornucopia or a recipe for disaster. And, yes, it can be both.)

As it turns out, I’ve been on the road quite a bit more than usual lately, first at Shop.org in Las Vegas last week—my coverage is here, and here—and now OpenWorld. People tend to fall into one of two camps on this topic, and I happen to be among those (the minority?) who love tradeshows and conferences—I think they’re great opportunities to test theories and gauge the pulse of the industry. If my schedule permitted it, I’d hit a show at least every couple of weeks. (On the other hand, about 60 seconds after I register for a show, I begin getting pummeled by PR pitches from well-intentioned folks who’ve glommed my name off the event’s press list. *That* I could do without—not least because I have a serious email addiction coupled with an inability to do email quickly. Do the math.)

All of which brings me back to my current deflowering on Virgin America. And we’ll finally get to the point, after the break…

This airline is a marvel to me—and not just because I thought JetBlue was going to be the last major entrant into the airline business (Song and Ted notwithstanding—spinoffs from Delta and United, respectively, they never really took off, if you’ll pardon the pun).

Everything about Virgin America’s effort strikes me as quixotic—a perfect word for the airline’s true godfather, Sir Richard Branson. (For reasons too archaic and esoteric to go into here—it has to do with limits on foreign ownership of domestic air carriers—Virgin America had to jump through hoops to prove its “Americanness” to the folks at the Federal Aviation Administration before it could open for business; Branson’s role had to be minimized, but no one questions he’s still the man behind the curtain.)

I can honestly say I’ve never been on a plane quite like it.

Well, no—that’s not true. It’s just an Airbus 320—been on those a lot. But once you get beyond the mechanical specs, everything else literally rewrites the book on domestic air travel.

The Web site and the frequent flyer program, EleVAte, both deserve discussion, and we’ll get to that. But that’s preflight stuff, not inflight. In the meantime, let’s talk about décor: Like JetBlue, Virgin goes to serious lengths to use design and style to establish and reinforce its brand. For example, just as JetBlue laid claim to to its namesake color for all its branding, Virgin has a long history of embracing the color red, and the airline is no different.

(Discussion for another day—a phrase you’ll hear me use quite often, as I forcibly restrain myself from breaking off into a far-flung tangent: the branding “ownership” of primary colors in each industry—in overnight shipping, DHL’s yellow and FedEx’s blue; in mobile-phone carriers, Sprint’s old red and Nextel’s yellow (the combined Sprint Nextel opted to retain the latter). Pick an industry, and I bet you can come up with two or three companies—often the top players in that field—singularly wedded to (and defined by) their own blue, red, yellow, or green color brand.)

The seats are all leather—not the only airline to do that, of course. But the back of each seat and the tray tables are made of leftover bits of Stormtrooper uniforms, the kind of lacquered white plastic that practically glistens up at you.

There are cupholders, for goodness’ sake.

All of that is just a prologue, though. What makes the Virgin experience unique—what makes the brand really fly—is the inflight entertainment system.

And, prologue or not, I’ve rambled on for way too long, so I’ll have to save the rest of this post for Part 2.