In-Air Net Has Takeoff Woes

Giving passengers the means to fire off e-mail messages and surf the Internet from airline seats 35,000 feet above the ground is still a bright idea on the business travel horizon.

But the harsh travel industry reality after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the economic climate may have slowed the technology’s arrival for the moment.

One company that hoped to wire airline cabins for e-mail and Internet access has folded, three big carriers have pulled out of another project as investors, and a third firm is still in the testing stage.

“It is not going forward at this time,” said Todd Burke, a spokesman for American Airlines. “We pretty much agreed after Sept. 11 that it is something we will consider but it is not a high priority for us.”

He was speaking of Connexion, a joint venture the AMR-owned airline entered into with Boeing Co., UAL Corp.’s United Airlines and Delta Air Lines.

The three U.S.-based airlines have dropped out as investors. A spokesman for Connexion said they may return as customers at some point, and a prototype soon will be in the air on Lufthansa. Seventeen carriers are in discussions with the venture, the spokesman said.

The Boeing project is a broadband satellite-based service that would provide high-speed Internet and intranet access as well as television and e-mail in real time to airline passengers.

But it’s impossible to predict when the economic climate and other concerns will free up the airlines to go after such technology in wholesale fashion.

“We are looking at connectivity options,” Burke said.

One of those options in American’s case apparently will not be the seat-back telephone. American is removing the devices from its domestic fleet because, Burke said, passengers were making an average of only three calls a day per aircraft.

Seat-back phones, though equipped with data ports, never have been popular for Internet access because of the hefty connection and per-minute charges involved.

Southwest already has removed its seat-back phones.

In both cases, the carriers said customers were using their own cellular phones while the planes were on the ground and passing on the option of making a call in the air.

American says it will keep a satellite-based telephone system on its longest-range aircraft--Boeing 777s and 767-300s. Those phones are equipped with data ports for passengers willing to pay the charges.

Even before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the economic downturn that battered business travel forced another player out of the airline Internet field.

In-Flight Network, a joint venture of Rockwell Collins Inc. and News Corp., had planned to offer a broadband service using satellites and technology from Qualcomm Inc. and Globalstar Telecommunications. But poor business conditions ended that effort.

The third player in the field is Seattle-based Tenzing Communications, which says it has tested systems operating on board 20 aircraft of Cathay Pacific and Brazil’s Varig and is talking with two or three other carriers.

Tenzing recently completed a test with Air Canada and says Cathay Pacific hopes to roll out the system commercially in midyear.

Tenzing’s system is not true real-time connectivity. Passengers can access a server on the plane that intermittently sends and receives bursts of data, refreshing cached news and securities quotes, for example, or sending and receiving e-mail.