Mobile phones on planes has arrived.....
Well, mobile phone use onboard aircraft has now arrived.
I boarded AF2653 from Kyiv to Paris today and noticed an extra symbol next to the 'fasten seatbelts' and 'no smoking' signs, it's a picture of a mobile phone with a line through. As we rotate the CC announce that Air France are trialing mobile phone use on this aircraft and once the 'no mobile phone use' sign has been switched off by the Captain we are free to use our phones. A leaflet in the seat back explains the trial and goes on to say that "the rates charged are comparable with international roaming rates but we should contact our own providers for exact costs"
The provider that AF are using is called OnAir. According to the CC it's only fitted to one aircraft, an A318, and will run until June when AF will make a decision about future use.
Sadly, the guy behind me really did pick up his phone and say "I'm calling you from the plane !" Whoever he was speaking to clearly didn't believe him.
I used my phone to send a few texts and also used my Blackberry to send email and surf the net. The Blackberry didn't really work very well, I did surf the net a little but it was painfully slow and only worked about 20% of the time, the purser said to me that bandwidth was very limited, only enough for about ten users to make a call at the same time.
There was a very detailed questionnaire we were asked to fill out about our usage and whether we felt the service was intrusive. I have to say that if they were to improve the data service I would use it but I just do not like the idea of mobile phone use on an aircraft, it's too intrusive. That said, it has now arrived and I don't think it's going away.....