I believe patio11 is positing -- I would -- that the user already knows his destination (or has a good enough idea) before waiting on a backend search for pricing. Maps, trivia, weather, etc are useless information in the majority of cases. Transitions appear useless. Just load my pricing data already! Stop wasting time loading this crap! It's like 4MB Flash, splash screens before I can load your 100K site. Yes, technically, in the airlines case, we can probably load a static image and trivia in the time it takes to query the backend, but the users are not technical and it just has the appearance of fluff, and they just want prices!
It would actually be interesting to test cases where a user would rather look at a loading screen than an image attempting to distract from the loading or vice versa.
Either way my main point was that well designed and tested apparent fluff that might lead to a tiny fraction of users abandoning searches before getting a price could make up for it by encouraging [other] purchases. If there's a time lag you may as well advertise in it.
Consumers running exploratory searches direct on an airline's website rather than via a comparison engine you might not be that price sensitive anyway...
