Wireless Internet Launched on Lufthansa FRA - IAD

JpMaxMan writes "On flight LH 418 from Frankfurt, Germany, to Washington, DC, Lufthansa AG began on Wednesday a three-month trial for a new onboard wireless broadband service that allows travelers to connect to the Internet some 10,000 meters in the sky."

Comments

The thing about airlines that scares me

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that they go through all this trouble to prevent bombs getting on board, yet they act like the plane will crash if I have my CD player on during take-off. Heck, if it could, and I wanted to crash the plane, I'd just turn it on and leave it out of sight!

Re:The thing about airlines that scares me

[Anonymous Coward]

You, as well as most of the public, knows nothing about airplane systems or operations. Electronic devices are *MOST LIKELY* not going to cause the airplane to crash. What they may do is interfere with various navigation systems causing the airplane to go off course. This increases the time of the flight, which increases the cost, which increases the ticket price.

Going off course also creates a safety hazard, in that the airplane may drift into the path of another one. HOWEVER, it is still unlikely that a crash will result as there is both a controller watching the airplanes on a radar (usually), and TCAS on the airplane (often airplaneS) in question which will alert crews to the danger. But you probably don't want to be a passanger when TCAS suddenly commands a descent.

So you're probably not going to crash an airplane with your electronic device, you'll just piss a lot of people off, and the pilot could quite easily have you arrested, as it is a federal offense.

Re:The thing about airlines that scares me

[fiftyfly]

"You, as well as most of the public, knows nothing about airplane systems or operations. Electronic devices are *MOST LIKELY* not going to cause the airplane to crash. What they may do is interfere with various navigation systems causing the airplane to go off course. This increases the time of the flight, which increases the cost, which increases the ticket price."

Riiight, so we're told that environmental radiation on these flights is high enough to be an "occupational hazard" but rather heavily regulated devices in my pocket are going to be a problem for the plane's (hopefully) hardend systems?

Bullshit.

Yeah, I gues I could some items like cell phones/radios maybe eletric motors & other such devices that are very rf "leaky" but there's no way in hell I'm buying that story for, say, a cd player.

I suppose there could be other reasons like "our insurance carrier will kill us if we don't take reasonable precautions to ensure that you at least pretend to pay attention to the (generally usesless - I mean wtf cares what you do if your plane smokes some field at 700km/hr?) safety notices, so please kindly turn the walkman"off". yeah I suppose I could buy that, but that's not what they tell you - they say some babble (and it's never really the same on each flight) about "being found to interfere with electrical systems" or "navigation systions" or "the plane's systems" and never once say anything meaningfull or cite a regulation, or give contact info for those with inquiries or complaints.

Re:shared connection?

[Jason1729]

Most people aren't going to download large quantities of mp3's or movies while sitting on a plane. They'll do that before they leave.

The service is intended for websurfing. Think about what percentage of time you spend loading pages vs reading them on your high speed connection. Even with 50 people sharing the connection, only a few will be downloading pages at a time, and the rest will be reading what they've already downloaded.

Jason
ProfQuotes

Re:RF Concerns a Non-Issue

[nucal]

The electronic device usage fear stems from cellular phone companies advising airlines not to use the phones in flight as they would have difficulting tracking the signal and the signal would reach many towers simultaneously.

I wonder how much of the ban on inflight cell phone use is also designed to force people into using (and paying for) air-to-ground phones installed on airliners.

So now electronics wont crash planes.....

[originalhack]

This finally proves the assertion that the reason for the ban on in-flight electronics was to protect Airfone and in-flight movies from competition and had nothing to do with RF interference. Now that the airlines found a way to extract revenue from this, suddenly spread-spectrum RF signals are perfectly safe.

Turn off your cellphone please. And put away that gameboy.

It's hard to feel sorry for the struggling airlines when lie as much as they do.

Goodbye Airphone -- Hello VoIP

[dracocat]

Great... I wonder if I can use Voice over IP! Seems like the connection is fast enough on the download side at least.. Although I would hate to see 60 people trying to make a phone call on that 128K uplink.