On a recent flight from New York to Oakland, California, Madeline Duva worked her BlackBerry pager with the intensity of a pinball player, right up to the second of four announcements from the flight crew reminding passengers that all electronic devices must be turned off.
Duva, a vice president with a San Francisco financial-data company, Sector Data, complied with the crew's request, but said the communications blackout during the six-hour flight left her worrying about a last-minute directive to a colleague.
"Now I'm sitting here and I'm thinking, `I hope that order went in,"' she said.
Despite her anxiety over the status of the deal -- and about whether a friend had gotten World Series tickets -- she resisted the urge to download e-mail messages to her BlackBerry for the duration of the flight.
"You want to play by the rules, because you don't know if it could cause a problem," she said.
Like many gadget-toting business travelers, Duva regularly inhabits what might be described as the eye of the information hurricane: In an era of information overload, air travel remains a unique exception to an increasingly networked world. Not only can passengers not get information about whether a deal went through or who is ahead in the bottom of the seventh inning, but they cannot seem to get a satisfying explanation for why they cannot use their cell phones, BlackBerries, or a host of other electronic devices in the air.
In the meantime, there is an ongoing face-off between passengers who surreptitiously -- and sometimes, blatantly -- use an array of gadgets to send text messages or even make voice calls, and flight crews who must keep an eye out for thumbs tapping away under a tray table (and then determine whether a particular device can safely be used for other tasks with its phone feature shut off).
Indeed, two flight attendants on the same Oakland-bound flight said that on every flight they had to ask a handful of passengers to turn off their electronic devices and that travelers were not always willing to oblige.
"At least we have passengers who tell us people are trying to do it behind our backs," said one flight attendant, who requested that her name not be used, adding that part of the problem is that travelers do not believe these devices cause interference with the aircraft's communications system.
Two of the leading initiatives to bring enhanced communication services to aircraft are testing their technologies with international carriers and private jets, but no one is willing to guess when American airline will have the money for this type of investment.
Connexion by Boeing, a division of Boeing that delivers a broadband Internet connection to aircraft, will start a trial with Lufthansa in January on a 747 flying from Frankfurt, Germany, to Dulles International Airport. A month later, British Airways will test the technology on a similar aircraft flying between Heathrow Airport and Kennedy International Airport.
The company also announced an agreement with Japan Airlines and has government and corporate clients in the US.
Using the Connexion by Boeing service, passengers can plug in their laptops, open a Web browser and enter a credit card number to pay a US$25 to US$35 fee per flight segment for unlimited Internet access -- but not anytime soon between, say, New York and Los Angeles.
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