Cell calls in flight mostly up in the air

Few technology enhancements to travel have been as fraught with angst as allowing cellphone use in flight.

Only 16% of leisure travelers said they would like to use their cellphones in flight, said Henry Harteveldt, vice president and principal analyst for Cambridge, Mass.-based travel research firm Forrester Research, which conducted a study.

“The truth is we do view flying as the last respite of being off the grid,” Harteveldt said.

Now it could be just a matter of having the right itinerary on the wrong airline before you find yourself sitting next to someone who’s chattering away at 35,000 feet. Several foreign airlines are implementing plans to offer in-flight cellphone use. Domestic flights, for now, don’t appear to be headed this way.

Air France announced in December that it was outfitting one of its planes with the capacity for cellphone use but only for text messages and e-mail on Web-enabled phones -- at first. The plane, an Airbus A318 that carries up to 123 passengers, operates on intra-European routes.

After six months, Air France will evaluate whether to allow voice calls.

Dublin-based low-cost carrier RyanAir, which announced in 2006 that it would make its entire fleet cellphone-enabled beginning in mid-2007, has not yet rolled out the service but hopes to have it up and running on 25 planes by June.

Both airlines are using technology offered by Geneva-based OnAir, which is owned partly by airplane manufacturer Airbus. In Asia, AirAsia, Kingfisher Airlines and Shenzhen Airlines have agreed to install OnAir cellphone technology.

Shenzhen plans to have it on several demonstration aircraft in time for the Summer Olympics, which begin in Beijing in August.

The cost of a call from a plane may act as a disincentive for your seatmate to dish the latest office gossip inches from your ear. It costs about as much as making an international call from a cellphone that’s based in the United States. AT&T; customers, for example, pay about $1.29 a minute while roaming in Europe.

The cost could be problematic, Harteveldt said.

“I don’t think it’s going to be a sustainable offering, even in Europe,” he said.

So far, however, flights within the U.S. are immune. In a March 2007 ruling, the Federal Communications Commission said the in-flight use of cellphones might interfere with ground networks and was, therefore, prohibited.

The Federal Aviation Administration, meanwhile, is concerned that cellphones will interfere with on-board communications.

So you may not want your neighbor discussing the most intimate details of his life, and there may be regulatory and technological reasons he can’t. But using the Internet through cellphones when you’re airborne is a different matter.

In a recent Forrester survey, 54% of leisure travelers said they would be interested in accessing the Internet on four-hour-plus flights. Several U.S. airlines are moving forward to offer that service.

In December, JetBlue began providing free in-flight e-mail and instant messaging services for customers on Wi-Fi-enabled laptops and smart phones.

Other U.S. airlines considering the possibility of offering Wi-Fi in the air are teaming up with Aircell, a Colorado-based company that in 2006 won an FCC auction for air-to-ground broadband frequencies.

American Airlines said that it would install the Aircell system on all 15 of its Boeing 767-200s used primarily on its transcontinental routes and that it might install it on more.

Aircell’s air-to-ground broadband system will provide customers with an Internet connection, virtual private network access (allowing workers to ply their trade by connecting them to their organization’s systems) and e-mail capabilities through Wi-Fi-enabled laptops, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and portable gaming devices.

Cellphone and voice over Internet protocol (VOIP) services such as Skype will not be available.

Virgin America plans to offer the Aircell service. The cost of the service to the customer has not been announced. US Airways and Alaska Airlines are also investigating in-flight Internet access, according to a recent Forrester report.

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