Wireless Internet Launched on Lufthansa FRA - IAD

JpMaxMan writes "On flight LH 418 from Frankfurt, Germany, to Washington, DC, Lufthansa AG began on Wednesday a three-month trial for a new onboard wireless broadband service that allows travelers to connect to the Internet some 10,000 meters in the sky."

The thing about airlines that scares me

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that they go through all this trouble to prevent bombs getting on board, yet they act like the plane will crash if I have my CD player on during take-off. Heck, if it could, and I wanted to crash the plane, I'd just turn it on and leave it out of sight!

Re:Some day...

[Anonymous Coward]

It is "free" in that they aren't changing you extra to use it. It's included in the cost of a ticket. Kinda odd that they're bundling this into the price while America West is looking at charging people seperately for meals.

Re:shared connection?

[Jason1729]

Most people aren't going to download large quantities of mp3's or movies while sitting on a plane. They'll do that before they leave.

The service is intended for websurfing. Think about what percentage of time you spend loading pages vs reading them on your high speed connection. Even with 50 people sharing the connection, only a few will be downloading pages at a time, and the rest will be reading what they've already downloaded.

Jason
ProfQuotes [profquotes.com]

Re:RF Concerns a Non-Issue

[nucal]

The electronic device usage fear stems from cellular phone companies advising airlines not to use the phones in flight as they would have difficulting tracking the signal and the signal would reach many towers simultaneously.

I wonder how much of the ban on inflight cell phone use is also designed to force people into using (and paying for) air-to-ground phones installed on airliners.

So now electronics wont crash planes.....

[originalhack]

This finally proves the assertion that the reason for the ban on in-flight electronics was to protect Airfone and in-flight movies from competition and had nothing to do with RF interference. Now that the airlines found a way to extract revenue from this, suddenly spread-spectrum RF signals are perfectly safe.

Turn off your cellphone please. And put away that gameboy.

It's hard to feel sorry for the struggling airlines when lie as much as they do.

Re:The thing about airlines that scares me

[Anonymous Coward]

You, as well as most of the public, knows nothing about airplane systems or operations. Electronic devices are *MOST LIKELY* not going to cause the airplane to crash. What they may do is interfere with various navigation systems causing the airplane to go off course. This increases the time of the flight, which increases the cost, which increases the ticket price.

Going off course also creates a safety hazard, in that the airplane may drift into the path of another one. HOWEVER, it is still unlikely that a crash will result as there is both a controller watching the airplanes on a radar (usually), and TCAS on the airplane (often airplaneS) in question which will alert crews to the danger. But you probably don't want to be a passanger when TCAS suddenly commands a descent.

So you're probably not going to crash an airplane with your electronic device, you'll just piss a lot of people off, and the pilot could quite easily have you arrested, as it is a federal offense.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

1m=3.218ft

Incredible

[bigberk]

This is amazing. Think about how far technology has come, that allows you broadband internet access on an airplane 35,000 ft high, travelling between two continents over nothing but water.

Holy crap.

I know the very first thing I would do, without a doubt, is fire up XMMS and listen to Digitally Imported Radio [www.di.fm], and smile :)

Re:The thing about airlines that scares me

[fiftyfly]

"You, as well as most of the public, knows nothing about airplane systems or operations. Electronic devices are *MOST LIKELY* not going to cause the airplane to crash. What they may do is interfere with various navigation systems causing the airplane to go off course. This increases the time of the flight, which increases the cost, which increases the ticket price."

Riiight, so we're told that environmental radiation on these flights is high enough to be an "occupational hazard" [hps.org] but rather heavily regulated devices in my pocket are going to be a problem for the plane's (hopefully) hardend systems?

Bullshit.

Yeah, I gues I could some items like cell phones/radios maybe eletric motors & other such devices that are very rf "leaky" but there's no way in hell I'm buying that story for, say, a cd player.

I suppose there could be other reasons like "our insurance carrier will kill us if we don't take reasonable precautions to ensure that you at least pretend to pay attention to the (generally usesless - I mean wtf cares what you do if your plane smokes some field at 700km/hr?) safety notices, so please kindly turn the walkman"off". yeah I suppose I could buy that, but that's not what they tell you - they say some babble (and it's never really the same on each flight) about "being found to interfere with electrical systems" or "navigation systions" or "the plane's systems" and never once say anything meaningfull or cite a regulation, or give contact info for those with inquiries or complaints.

Goodbye Airphone -- Hello VoIP

[dracocat]

Great... I wonder if I can use Voice over IP! Seems like the connection is fast enough on the download side at least.. Although I would hate to see 60 people trying to make a phone call on that 128K uplink.

Re:The thing about airlines that scares me

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's just because they have no way of knowing that your CD player is actually a CD player. It could be a radio that listens in on the flight crew. It could just as easily be a device designed to screw with the navigation systems, or it could even be a homing beacon for a missle. I realize that the chances of someone doing this are pretty close to zero, but even if you were to open up the CD player how many people could look at the circuit board and tell you what it actaully does?

Re:shared connection?

[Anonymous Coward]

Besides, what is their uplink? I'd bet it's satellite, which means 600ms+ latency.

Re:Risk is more dependant on your software

[Anonymous Coward]

This bug allows C++ programmers to access protected and private data that is SUPPOSED to be secured by the C++ virtual machine. Here?s a simple example of a crack that would allow a C++ programmer to access improperly secured data:

Plonk

C++ doesn't have a virtual machine--like C, it's designed to run directly on real hardware. Most modern OSes provide memory protection to keep processes from harming each other or the OS, but none of them try to protect programs from themselves.

Go read a couple OS books and stop ranting against Microsoft. Frankly, you don't know what you're talking about.

(Having said that, C and C++ are more or less responsible for the most common class of security bugs, simply because buffer overflows are so easy in both languages. It's not really a flaw as such, though--it's really more of a feature of the mindset and system model behind C, and a sign of shoddy programming. Languages like Java and Perl without easy access to pointers are still prone to other security bugs. You just have to try fractionally harder to produce them.)

Power Cord?

[Prof.Phreak]

Does that imply they'll actually have a place for me to plugin my laptop??? With these fast processors, batteries only last a little over an hour (if even that), and on a long 6-9 hour flight, well, you get the idea...

AND, unless you're first class, there is no way they'll let you plug it in anywhere; unless you go to the rest-room and sit there for an hour to charge the damn battery.

Re:The thing about airlines that scares me

[DennyK]

Yeah, I gues I could some items like cell phones/radios maybe eletric motors & other such devices that are very rf "leaky" but there's no way in hell I'm buying that story for, say, a cd player.

The flight attendants have better things to do than to examine every portable electronic device on the plane to figure out which ones might be "leaky" enough to potentially cause problems. So they make the rule simple; if it's electronic, turn it off.

...but that's not what they tell you - they say some babble (and it's never really the same on each flight) about "being found to interfere with electrical systems" or "navigation systions" or "the plane's systems"

Because if they told some other story, people would probably argue with them. And the truth is, any device *could* potentially interfere with the plane's systems. Unless you happen to carry around an RF meter of some sort with you (and good luck getting that past security ;) ), you have no idea how much or what kind of RF energy your Walkman is putting out.

or give contact info for those with inquiries or complaints.

You can probably contact the airline to inquire about any of their rules or procedures if you want. I'm sure they will be happy to explain them to you. There's probably an address or phone number on your ticket envelope.

As for complaints...why? Unless a device is regulating some biological function neccesary for your continued existance as a living being, surely you can live without it for the 15-20 minutes it takes to take off and land. Just sit back, relax, read a magazine, say hello/goodbye to your neighbor, or find something else to do that isn't battery powered. ;)

DennyK

Well that was bright...

[simi-lost]

Since they have been releasing all this hype about how wireless is a security threat as a terrorist tool, now they are putting it on aircraft. Well,if they are using wireless to hide their identity, at least we have the subjects narrowed down to being on a particular aircraft. They'll only have to weed through a couple hundred passangers to find the culprets.

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