Phones on 'planes

The dial-high club

Mobile phones on planes may not be as annoying as some people think

AS AIRLINES struggle with high fuel prices, they have been looking for new ways to generate “ancillary revenues”. This week JetBlue, an American airline, said it would start charging $7 for a pillow and blanket on some flights. Other airlines are demanding extra to check in luggage, or for more legroom. And as the regulatory hurdles to using mobile phones on planes continue to fall, airlines are salivating at the idea of charging passengers $2.50 a minute to make calls and 50 cents for a text message.

It should come as no surprise that Ryanair, the leading European low-cost carrier, which generated €488m ($690m) in ancillary revenue last year, is one of the most enthusiastic proponents of in-flight calling. It plans to fit its entire fleet with the necessary equipment, which is being provided by OnAir, an in-flight communications provider backed by Airbus, Europe’s planemaking giant. Oman Air, TAP Portugal, bmi and AirAsia are also adopting OnAir’s technology. AeroMobile, a rival technology provider, has signed up airlines including Emirates, Qantas and Turkish Airlines.

The technology works (handsets talk to a tiny base-station, or “picocell” on the plane, which connects to the phone network via satellite); safety concerns and worries about interference with ground-based networks have been overcome (though phones will have to be switched off for take-off and landing); and airlines are convinced of the business case. But what do passengers think? Many have expressed concern at having to sit next to tedious blabbermouths.

So the results from the first trials of in-flight communications equipment are reassuring. Emirates has installed AeroMobile’s equipment on ten of its aircraft since March. On July 30th AeroMobile said reaction had been “overwhelmingly positive”, with around half of passengers switching on their phones during flights. Text messaging proved most popular, and the average length of voice calls was just 2½ minutes. Most of these calls were made on daytime flights; the number on night flights was “minimal”.

Air France, which has been testing OnAir’s gear on short-haul flights in Europe and north Africa, says 80% of those polled wanted the service to be deployed across the airline’s entire fleet. On a typical flight about 100 text messages were sent or received and ten megabytes of data transferred by a dozen BlackBerry users. Passengers said they liked being able to inform people on the ground of changes in their arrival details.

In short, fears that in-flight telephony will be a nuisance, rather than a benefit, seem to be wide of the mark. That is good news for passengers hoping to get some sleep—and for airlines desperately looking for new sources of revenue.