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Boeing to Have Net Access on Airliners in 2002
wowbagger writes: "According to Yahoo,
Boeing is going to have Internet access on airliners in 2002. The stated cost will be about $20/hour, and it will be strictly BYOC - it sounds like they'll be loaning you a wireless card. I wonder how this will stack up with the FAA regs against using "anything that sends or receives a signal", how many clueless users will not be able to configure their systems to use the card, and how many 1337 h@><0r doods will be 0w3n1ng other passenger's machines. Think I'll review my iptables setup before I fly..."
I ask that passengers put their Hotmail accounts
in the logged out positions, and put on their seat
belts. It has been a pleasure carrying you on
AOL-Time-Warner-American-Airlines, and I hope
you'll choose to fly with us again.
Passengers forget to turn phones off all the time. It should be the job of the plane manufacturers to make planes safe in the presence of passengers.
/. readers truly never get on planes. I know I might be the other extreme (gf works for an airline, I fly 4-6 times a month) but this is ridiculous.
The planes you get on are much, much older than you think. They don't predate bag phones, but they definitely predate your spiffy handheld Nokia that plays games. (Think about the DC-10's - those bad boys are older than I am, and I'm not that young.) Furthermore, the planes were designed long before they were built. These planes just weren't designed to handle dozens of people holding battery-operated microcomputers, let alone 2-way radios (which is essentially what a cell phone is.)
These Boeings that are coming out are the first generation of planes that are specifically designed with today's wired user in mind, and as such, you're seeing wireless access on board.
2.4GHz is already polluted by wideband radiation in planes, since they use microwave ovens to heat the food. So there can be some level of confidence that you 802.11 tranciever isn't going to bring the plane down.
No, they don't use microwaves to heat ALL the food, only a few small things. I mean really, can you imagine them heating up meals for 120 people in microwaves? Even if they had half a dozen microwaves, and each meal only took 30 seconds, that's a long time. They get the meals pre-heated from the ground crew - those meal trucks that pull up to the plane, and then rise up to the back door.
However being charged money to get on the net is not really a necessity is it? One person sets his laptop up as a gateway/NAT router and everyone else sets up as an ad-hoc 802.11 network. That would save people a bit of cash.
I'm going to shell out my money for internet access on the plane, which isn't going to be fast by any means, and then I'm going to share it with other people for free? And furthermore, I'm going to waste time on my flight to run up and down the aisles asking if anybody wants to set up a quick network? Riiight. For that matter, we could do this today - the GTE Airfones have 9600 (woohoo) data access, and we could easily set up connection sharing using one of those bad boys. But we don't, because in an airplane, the last thing you want to do is get to know people up and down the plane, especially the ones who are trying to mooch internet access.
So lobby lobby your MP/Senator/FAA rep/garage mechanic/EU minister to change the rules. It will improve the quality of your traveling life.
No, not until the current fleet of planes is replaced. And not just replaced at one airline, but replaced at all of them - remember that "value" airlines usually buy their planes used from other airlines, so even today's planes will be in service for 20-30 years.
How the parent post got modded up to 5 Insightful is disgusting, either that or
What's your damage, Heather?
Actually, being online in an airplane would allow you to communicate with people during a plane crash, something passengers normally can't do.
Have you flown in the last ten years? GTE has Airfones in the back of the seats. For $2-$5 a minute, you can call anybody you want, get stock quotes, get the weather, and more.
With the 'net though, you could discuss the entire situation much sooner. Write entire emails.
Again, you can do that now too. The Airfones have modem jacks.
What's your damage, Heather?
Re - "FAA regs against using 'anything that sends or receives a signal'"
It's actually not an FAA rule. It's FCC. The FCC forbids using a cellphone from any platform not attached to the ground.
It's against FCC rules to use a phone from a hot-air baloon, and from parachutes - both of which are not regulated by the FAA.
Both the FCC and FAA websites suck, but here's a pretty interesting article. The rule is in FCC reg 22.925 - maybe somebody else will have better luck finding the text.
The nutshell is that the problem hasn't got anything do to with interference with navigation, but rather interference with ground systems. Cellphone just weren't designed to be able to "see" so many different cell towers.
_Am
Yeah, and then take the laptop and a webcam with you to broadcast to the world in glorious technicolour and stereo sound your application for entry into the Mile High Club :-)
"Life is like a sewer - what you get out of it depends on what you put into it" - Tom Lehrer
Your GPS doesn't altitude from pressure. The reason your altitude was wrong was that you didn't have a good 3D sat. fix.
To get a 3D fix, you need at least 4 sats. (think of it as an algebra problem: you have 4 unknowns (x,y,z, and time) so you need 4 equations (4 birds) to solve for it. If the GPS receiver only gets 3 birds, it fakes it by assuming you are on the Earth's surface, and using that as the 4th equation.
Since you were in a big metal can with only a small hole next to you, you probably only got 3 birds.
However, you were in violation of airline regs using a GPS receiver on an aircraft (unless you had permission from the captain). You just didn't get caught.
The problem is that almost all modern radio receivers, be they GPS, cell phone, or cheap transistor radio watch, are a superheterodyne design: the incoming signal is mixed with a second signal to create a third signal at a fixed frequency. That second signal, called the local oscillator or LO, radiates from the receiver and can interfere with other signals. That's how the police "radar detector detectors" work: they listen for the LO of your radar detector.
You can demonstrate this by taking 2 old AM radios, and placing them next to one another. Tune one radio to 600 kHz, then tune the other to about 1055 kHz. Move the tuning around, and you should hear the first radio start to squawk. That's the second radio's LO being received by the first radio.
www.eFax.com are spammers
The eTrex Summit I had does to it by pressure, It said it was accurate up to 13ft, and it showed 4 sats connected (max on that screen, I probably had more). If you go into the diag screen it actually shows you the pressure. It was saying I was at 5k feet.
However, you were in violation of airline regs using a GPS receiver on an aircraft (unless you had permission from the captain). You just didn't get caught.
I didn't have permission, and they did see it. They didn't have a problem with me using it (flight attendents). They never did ask the captian.
--
Free Mac Mini
The planes you get on are much, much older than you think
/. readers truly never get on planes. I know I might be the other extreme (gf works for an airline, I fly 4-6 times a month) but this is ridiculous.
The planes are. The avionics aren't. That's all that matters.
How the parent post got modded up to 5 Insightful is disgusting, either that or
It was modded up to +5 because the poster nailed the issues square on the head. The idea of EMI/RFI from Part 15 devices bringing down a commercial jetliner is either laughable or it's horrible, and either way, it shouldn't be the passengers' problem.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
Forget that, how about 0wNz0r1Ng the plane itself!
Re: Crashing
From: Bertie the Bunyip
> This DC-9 is pitching around and around and headed
>for the ground.
>Aaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!
Your use of the obsolete designator "DC-9" for the MD-80 aircraft indicates you know nothing about aviation. And motion around the axis of thrust isn't "pitching". It's called "roll".
You deserve to die.
Intentional radiators on planes (carried by passengers at least) are not presently permitted and so the whole issue is moot until there is a change in these regulations.
The reason that the Bluetooth and 802.11 crowd keeps working on this is that there is some hope for movement by the FAA/CAA/Other regulatory bodies. The arguments are pretty simple..
1) 2.4GHz is already polluted by wideband radiation in planes, since they use microwave ovens to heat the food. So there can be some level of confidence that you 802.11 tranciever isn't going to bring the plane down.
2) Electrical interference is a function of both the strength of the interferer and the succeptability of the interferree. Plane equipment is supposed to be built to stringent succeptability requirements. When someone says you phone/pda/toothbrush will interfere with the plane, ask why the equiment on the plane is operating outside the succeptability requirements mandated for planes. The responsibility to make interference not be a problem has be foisted on the passengers. This is a bad thing. Passengers forget to turn phones off all the time. It should be the job of the plane manufacturers to make planes safe in the presence of passengers.
3) There is lots of lobbying going on.
However being charged money to get on the net is not really a necessity is it? One person sets his laptop up as a gateway/NAT router and everyone else sets up as an ad-hoc 802.11 network. That would save people a bit of cash.
If all you wanted to do was play quake with your peers, you wouldn't need net access at all. 802.11 can work peer to peer. You don't need an AP just to communicate between a group of machines.
So lobby lobby your MP/Senator/FAA rep/garage mechanic/EU minister to change the rules. It will improve the quality of your traveling life.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Just run a webserver on your laptop when flying with the plane...submit it to slashdot: enjoy the feeling of being slashdotted 10000feet above the surface.
It's likely you'd get just dial-up speeds on your connection. The data rates mentioned in this part of the article are FOR THE ENTIRE PLANE:
Passengers will need to bring their own Internet connection device--a laptop computer, for instance--to use the service, Carson said, and the service operates at data rates of 5 mbps for incoming traffic and 1mbps for outgoing.
The very next paragraph indicates that bandwidth, when split up among the passengers doesn't look so speedy::
The speed will depend on the number of Internet users during each flight. Connexion by Boeing spokesman Terrance Scott says customers will have a minimum Internet hook-up equivalent to a 56K modem but should be able to get higher speeds.
Though unstated in the article, I wonder how long it would be before some kind of bandwidth limiting may be imposed on the passengers; otherwise, a couple people streaming audio/video/pr0n to their laptops could saturate the connection.
Besides the data rate, also consider ping times -- from what I understand the communications from the plane go by way of satelite. Don't know if they'll use low earth orbit sats or geosynchronous; but if the latter, you'll have some major roundtrip delays, too.
Actually, being online in an airplane would allow you to communicate with people during a plane crash, something passengers normally can't do.
Imagine being in IRC and explaining to your friends that these are your last moments. Kinda freaky. You could start spouting your passwords, or leave a love note. Think of the things people wished they could say on the way down.
I actually first thought of this with cellphone text messaging, but the problem is you don't have signal (at least with ground-tower based service) until you are near ground. So if you were quick, you could fire off a "So long..." to one of your buddies just before impact.
With the 'net though, you could discuss the entire situation much sooner. Write entire emails.
Geez, maybe I should stop now. I have a 10 hour plane flight tomorrow after all...
I wouldn't worry too much about them. If they ever happen to find themselves on an airplane, they'll be too freaked out by the light and the people to be able to do anything. Script kiddies are used to the apparent comfort and protection of their dark and lonely rooms.
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
I've left my tech support period behind me, luckily. But for the new people this might well be a nice alternative than sitting in a cubicle all day.
Oh no, now we shall need a utility to set the clock every time we change time zones.
Philip
Signatures are broken
lets say i h4X0r some site while flying in international waters.
what laws will govern what i do?