Spammed at 35,000 Feet

Canadians have come up with some pretty impressive inventions over the years--insulin, Pablum, basketball, the space shuttle robot arm, Wayne Gretzky and Shania Twain. We’ll overlook three-down football.

Recently, Air Canada and some Australian entrepreneurs came up with something we didn’t know we needed: live, instantaneous e-mail to and from airborne commercial airplanes. Now you can get every single e-mail in your in-box and reply, instantly, even as you fly over Nebraska at 35,000 feet (or 10,668 meters if you’re over Canada). Gee, thanks.

How have we survived without taking the electronic squirrel cage of e-mail up in the air to prevent two cursorless hours without spam, company directives and inspiring stories that distant friends just had to share but wouldn’t have if it had cost them a stamp? So much for the perfect “I was traveling” excuse for not answering messages within minutes.

There is a serious competitive commercial point to this, of course: Airlines seek any advantage in the battle for lucrative business travelers. First, there were frequent-flier miles, free newspapers, extra legroom, double frequent-flier miles, in-flight movies, seats that become beds and in-flight telephones that can cost more per minute of air time than the flight ticket does. Until now, however, inveterate e-mail mailers had to download messages before boarding the plane, work on their messages once aloft and, after deplaning, dump their responses back into the e-mail system. You may have noticed data ports creeping through society into hotel rooms and right up to the pay phones by airport gates.

A few months ago Air Canada teamed with Seattle’s Tenzing Communications to begin free trials of in-flight e-mail using phones in the seat backs of five 767s on routes with heavy business traffic, including Los Angeles-Toronto. Singapore Airlines has equipped one plane for e-mail, using satellites. Virgin Atlantic, Cathay Pacific and SAS will follow by fall. Once enough people become addicted, there will be a system charge by the day, though a spokeswoman stresses that the 24-hour pass will cost far less than a few minutes of in-flight telephone charges.

Air Canada reports (by land line) that nearly 10,000 travelers registered at its Web site, www.aircanada.ca/tenzing, for in-flight e-mail service and initial reaction is very positive. Who’d have thought only a few years ago that by 2001 we’d need someone--not necessarily Canadian--to also invent a credible excuse for not checking e-mail while flying over the Rockies seven miles high at 600 mph?