American Airlines bringing in-flight Internet to more domestic flights

by Scott Carmichael on

There is no denying it – in-flight Internet is here to stay. The popularity of being able to get some work (or fun) done during your flight helped make in-flight WiFi one of the winners of the 2008 Engadget awards.

This morning, American Airlines announced their commitment to the service by revealing plan to bring the Gogo in-flight Internet service to 300 of its domestic planes.

American Airlines has been testing the service, and has installed it on 15 planes, Passenger feedback has been so positive that 150 of their MD-80’s will be outfitted with the equipment this year, and another 150 planes next year.

Getting online costs just $9.95 for flights 3 hours or less, and $12.95 for longer flights. Recently, Gogo introduced a new price plan for users with a handheld device or smartphone – they can now get online for just $7.95.

I took the Gogo service for a spin last year, and as far as I cam concerned, it can’t can’t come fast enough on every plane in the country.

How safe is your in-flight entertainment? Possibly, not very.

by Jamie Rhein on

There you are on your international flight flipping through the channels of your in-flight offerings. A movie? Music? TV? games? Movie then music? Music than movie? Parts of different movies? It’s remote heaven.

The problem with all that bounty is the power that allows it to happen. All those electronics generate enough heat to make an armrest reach 100 to 115 degrees–even when the in-flight system is not in use. Think of all those screens and all those armrests and all that wiring.

According to some experts and the people who maintain airplanes’ electrical systems, there are safety issues to think about. In-flight systems are disasters waiting to happen.

Reading this article in USA Today with this disasters waiting to happen news brought up images of an electrical strip with every gadget imaginable plugged into it. It seems to me there must be some way to install a switch that would break a circuit if one part of the system got too hot–sort of how a fuse works.

I’m not sure if I should worry or not when I settle in my seat this summer as I wing my way from Columbus to Venice. I’ll probably be too excited channel surfing to wonder if my arm rest is getting too hot. If I see smoke, I’ll tell the flight attendant and look for something to smother the flames just in case. [photo by davitydave]

Ryanair introduces in-air mobile phone calls on select routes

by Scott Carmichael on

Last year, Ryanair optimistically announced that they were just “weeks” away from launching their in-air mobile phone and data service.

It took a little longer than planned, but the first 20 planes are now equipped with the gear needed to let passengers annoy their fellow passengers with their mindnumming phone conversations.

The 20 planes are all on routes to and from Dublin, and the service allows passengers to make and receive phone calls, send and receive text messages, and transmit data.

Thankfully, the in-air prices are so high, that most people will probably keep their calls to a simple “hi mom, I’m in the air”.

Calls will cost between €2 and €3 per minute, and data is a staggering €1.50 per 100KB (about the size of a basic email). For comparison – a 3 hour broadband WiFi session on Virgin America costs under $10.

Of course, the whole thing is rather ironic, since we have been told for years that keeping your phone on may result in the plane crashing and killing everyone. That was of course until the airlines learned they could make money off your calls. Then it was suddenly no problem.

Jeffrey covered a different angle of in-flight mobile phones today; the mobile phone in the cockpit. Of course, the issue here is not interference from signals, but the interference from a ringing phone during critical portions of the flight.

I’m pretty much addicted to my mobile phone, but even I think filling a low cost carrier plane with 100 chatting passengers will eventually result in someone having to have their mobile phone surgically removed.

Big news in inflight Internet – United Airlines and Aircell ink deal

by Scott Carmichael on

Great news from the world of inflight Internet access – United Airlines just committed to adding the Aircell Gogo broadband service to their fleet.

The first planes to benefit from the service are the 13 Boeing 757’s that operate on the United Airlines p.s. routes, from New York JFK to Los Angeles and San Francisco.

United Airlines is the fifth airline to sign a deal with Aircell. Previously American Airlines, Delta, Virgin America and Air Canada decided to offer the service to their passengers, and several of these airlines are already in fairly advanced stages of rolling things out to their entire fleet.

The Aircell Gogo service will be available on these United Airlines planes in the second half of 2009. Access is just $12.95 for the duration of the flight, which is a real bargain considering p.s. flights are all trans-continental.

Once the service comes to other routes, passengers on shorter trips can access the service for $9.95 if their flight is under 3 hours.

We took the Gogo service for a spin on Virgin America back in November, and I was very impressed with the speed, and ease of use. As someone who lives in a United hub city, a fleetwide rollout can’t come fast enough for me.

The addition of United Airlines means that Aircell has managed to sign contracts with most of the major carriers in the US, an amazing achievement in just 12 months.

US Airways to remove all movies from it’s fleet

by Grant Martin on

If you were one of the last six people in the country that thought that US Airways was cool, you now have a reason to jump ship: the Tempe, Arizona based company just announced that it was abandoning all of its domestic In Flight Entertainment (IFE) systems and that it will further scrap any plans of ever implementing any.

The culprit, they claim, is the five hundred pounds of extra weight that the systems add to each aircraft, thus taking more fuel to fly around the country.

US Airways: I know that your focus groups and business travelers don’t place that high of a priority on In Flight Entertainment because they like to work on their laptops or crackberry around. But this is AMERICA. Our favorite national past time is watching television. We love it. And the 90% of people that don’t have a laptop, Blackberry or Malcom Gladwell’s last piece of non-fiction are going to get PISSED when their TV’s go away. Do yourself a favor and save one of the last things that you had over the other legacy carriers with no IFE.

If you were still booked on an overseas US Airways flight, you can take down your craigslist posting for your tickets down and breathe a sigh of relief for now — only domestic IFE is going away. But at this rate, who knows how long the airline, proper, is going to last.