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Talk isn't Always Cheap
The Travel Technologist · August 31, 2000

Talk is cheap - unless you're at 36,000 feet.

Then it can be very costly. I just spent 4 ½ hours on a flight between Los Angeles and Baltimore staring at the graphic display on my seatback phone. With nothing better to do than add up the rates being flashed by at regular intervals, I soon reached the same troubling conclusion that many other travelers have: this phone is a rip-off.

Start with a $2.99 connection fee. Then add a $3.28 per-minute airtime charge (these rates are for market-leading Airfone which are installed on US Airways, United, Continental and TWA aircraft, among others) and a five-minute domestic call from the friendly skies can set you back $19.39.

But you probably already knew that. You knew that in-flight calls are as expensive as the cabin air is stale. And like everyone else, you wish you could just turn on your cell phone and use it enroute, because there really isn't a single documented case of a portable phone bringing a plane down.

The conventional wisdom now says carriers are banning cell phone use not because of safety, but for profit. We'll soon find out if that's true.

Air Canada is offering Internet access from some of its planes later this year. Cathay Pacific will be there by 2001. And Virgin Atlantic's 'Earth Calling' program will give passengers Internet hook-ups by 2002. The rest will probably follow sooner or later.

What does Internet access have to do with phones? Well, if the airlines want to take us to the dry cleaners with phone charges then you know what comes next. Our Internet phone calls from these on-board terminals will either be restricted or entirely disabled so that we have to use the pricey phones installed in the seatback.

Should that happen, then passengers have every right to be angry at airlines, not just for being less than straightforward with them, but for taking advantage of their best customers in the most shortsighted way.

Call me an optimist, but I think the airborne phones will eventually go away, replaced by a more reasonably priced kind of Internet phone. This, of course, raises a whole new set of questions about in-flight communication:

• How will airlines make money off us now? United Airlines is already giving us the headsets in economy class. If forward-looking airlines like JetBlue and Virgin offer us cut-rate or, God forbid, free Internet access on their planes, how will carriers squeeze out the additional revenue that shareholders seem to demand from them? I have no idea.
  
  
• Will cell phones be allowed? I doubt it. The airline industry doesn't know enough about the cellular phone business (and vice versa) for anyone to agree on what's safe and what's not safe. Until then, we should sit back and enjoy the urban legends making the rounds about rogue cell phone users sending planes into mountains.
  
  
• Will we ever get any privacy? If we can make cheap calls from the air and access e-mail, will there ever be another opportunity to be alone, untethered from pagers, cell phones and other wireless devices? Not so long ago the plane was one of the last places a traveler could find the solace so essential to staying sane on the road. Now, even that's gone.
  
  
• How will we get along? There's already tension between business and leisure travelers over the use of the overpriced seatback phones. But what happens when those phones morph into Internet phones? What happens when we really can take our office with us on a plane? One or two phone calls are bearable, you'd think. But multiply that by one hundred and the result is utter pandemonium. It's possible that some aircraft will come with a "no calls" section for passengers who want to sleep.

Ignore these questions and they won't go away. On the contrary: if they aren't addressed, we could see unprecedented air rage incidents, as road warriors do battle with tourists in the back of the plane. We all need to be a part of this debate - including pilots, whose fears that a cell phone could interfere with their navigational equipment must not be ignored.

Above all, this is a discussion for now, and not 2002, when most of these onboard Internet systems will come online. If we wait until then it might already be too late to have an intelligent, coherent debate.

I'd like your opinions. What are your questions about in-flight communication? What are your predictions - and hopes - for the future of airline travel as it pertains to wireless devices? Should cell phones be banned? Should airlines offer free Internet access from the cabin? Do you care?

E-mail me with your opinions at chris@elliott.org. As always, please include your full name, city of residence and what you do for a living.

Christopher Elliott is a travel commentator and author of A Bridge to Nowhere: A Year in the Florida Keys. All e-mailed questions may be edited, condensed or republished at the site's discretion. The Travel Technologist appears weekly on this site. This story was also published on Biztravel.com.