Crave

(Credit: Virgin America)

Last November, when Virgin America debuted Gogo's Wi-Fi service on a single flight, it stated that by the second quarter of 2009, the service would be available fleet-wide. On Wednesday, it announced that it had reached its goal.

Virgin America has done that with GoGo Inflight Internet, enabling all Virgin America customers to experience Internet service at 37,000 feet.

The company demonstrated its Wi-Fi tech by hosting a Skype video chat conference with Oprah Winfrey during a live taping of her show. The segment is set to air Thursday, May 21. Unless you're a billionaire media personality, however, don't expect to be doing any video chatting yourself on flights. Virgin America doesn't typically allow voice over IP (VoIP) products like Skype due to concerns about keeping the cabin as quiet as possible.

The Gogo service is available for $12.95 for daytime flights of more than three hours, $9.95 for daytime flights of less than three hours, $5.95 on red-eye flights, and $7.95 for handheld devices.

The idea is instead of the traditional paper boarding passes, passengers will use their mobile phones or PDAs to board an airplane.

American Airlines tried out this new method for the first time on Thursday with passengers leaving on domestic flights from Chicago's O'Hare International Airport.

Mobile boarding pass.

(Credit: cellphonedigest.net)

Starting Monday, mobile boarding passes will also be offered as an option for passengers departing on domestic flights from Los Angeles International and John Wayne Orange County airports.

This is how it works: when buying the ticket online, passengers must provide an active e-mail address to which their boarding pass will be sent, in the form of a 2D bar code.

Upon arriving at the airport, the passenger can open the e-mail on their Internet-enabled mobile device to have the bar code scanned at the Transportation Security Administration's checkpoints and at the airline's gates.

Passengers can also use the same method for check-in luggage at American Airlines' self-service machines, ticket counters, or curbside check-in facilities.

During the introduction of this new feature, there are a few minor restrictions. Passengers can list only one person in their reservation and must be traveling on American or American Eagle nonstop or a trip that doesn't involve changing planes, to a domestic destination.

The destination, however, can be anywhere within the 50 United States, as well as the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico.

This is just the beginning, if the tryout proves successful with the TSA, American Airlines will extend this new mobile boarding method to other U.S. airports.

Personally, I hope this will happen with all the airlines. It makes a lot of sense, especially when most cell phones are able to connect to the Internet these days.

I recently wrote a column about using American Airlines' new in-flight Wi-Fi service to blog at 37,000 feet. I did a couple of speed tests and ran some Hulu video, but the one thing I never thought of doing is pulling up a porn site.

Now, Bloomberg is reporting that American's flight attendants are concerned about just that--that too many passengers will try to get their mile-high Web porn fixes.

It's unclear whether those worries stem from a specific incident or incidents, but it appears both passengers and flight attendants raised some red flags and the leaders of the American Association of Flight Attendants brought it up with American Airlines' management. They urged the company "to filter its in-flight Internet service to block access to pornography and other Web sites the workers said were inappropriate."

No mile-high Web porn fix for me.

(Credit: John Falcone/CNET Networks)

Personally, I get a little embarrassed when even a semi-nude scene flashes on the screen of my iPod or portable DVD player while I'm watching a movie on a plane (we're talking R-rated here). If there are any younger fliers around I'll do my best to shield the screen or jump ahead a chapter. But people do some crazy stuff on planes, so it wouldn't totally surprise me to hear about a passenger casually perusing some porn sites and thinking nothing of it. There are people out there who think, "I bought this seat, I can act or smell as badly as I want in it."

Moral majority aside, I can see where the flight attendants are coming from. They're the ones who have to deal with passengers' complaints and will be forced to regulate what people are looking at. Better to nip it in the bud and block sites like they do at a lot of workplaces. But the problem is there's some subjectivity when it comes to what's offensive or not. Just ask Janet Jackson.

Anybody have any solutions? Or good stories about people watching sketchy material on a plane you were on? Let us know in the Talkback section.

Look where I've gone at home...

(Credit: FlightMemory.com)

If you're a serious airline geek like me, you've saved every airline boarding pass you've ever used. No, it doesn't make sense but you do it anyway. But until recently, my boarding passes sat in a box with really no practical use except for the occasional bookmark. That was until I learned about a Web site that lets you put your flight history to very good use.

FlightMemory.com is a fantastic and free Web site that allows you to log your commercial flights into a database that will then give you oodles of cool statistics. You can see how long you've spent in the air, how many miles/kilometers you've flown, your total number of flights, your shortest and longest flights, a map of all your routes, and your top airlines, airports, routes, and aircraft types. FlightMemory even will tell you how how many times you've circled the Earth, and how many times you've flown to the moon and the Sun. Logging in all those flights does take a lot of time, but the results are worth it once you add everything in. Though my boarding passes only dated back to 1996, I was able to recall most of my prior flights from memory (geek alert!). For many flights I couldn't recall whether I had a window, middle, or aisle seat, but the site will track that as well.

...and abroad

(Credit: FlightMemory.com)

According to my profile, I've circumnavigated the Earth 16.47 times and I've flown to the moon 1.7 times. I've barely made it to the Sun but I doubt I'll fly 93 million miles in my lifetime. My total flying distance is 410,056 miles, which translates to 39.01 days in the air. Yet that's nothing when compared with my friend who is a flight attendant with United Airlines. He's flown 3.56 million miles (that's 14.92 trips to the moon) and has spent 10.93 months aloft. And he still has flights to record.

FlightMemory also lets you purchase a poster with a world map of all your routes. I want to make it to South America before buying mine, but I'm saving space on my wall now.

If you're flying Delta Air Lines out of New York's LaGuardia Airport, you can now flash your cell phone to get onboard. On Tuesday, the airline rolled out a partnership with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to test out a "paperless check-in"--passengers download a boarding pass onto their cell phones and have it scanned by the TSA at the airport's security checkpoint as well as when they board the plane.

Fellow domestic carrier Continental is already testing a similar program.

The speedier check-in is limited to cell phone customers who can access the mobile Web on their phones, a release explained. And, at least for the time being, Delta's test only applies to domestic travelers flying out of LaGuardia.

"Passengers can now quickly check in for their flight while en route to the airport in a taxi or walking from the parking lot to the terminal," Steve Gorman, executive vice president of operations at Delta, said in the release. "The check-in process now can take place from anywhere, any time within 24 hours of flight departure."

They'll have to present ID, of course. Earlier this month, the TSA ruled that if you refuse to show ID, you can't get on the plane.

Small, "techie" enhancements have been appearing on the airline-news radar recently, as U.S. carriers look for inexpensive ways to make up for cutbacks elsewhere in response to high fuel prices--charging for checked baggage, eliminating perks. United Airlines is rolling out iPod hookups through a partnership with Apple that Delta and Continental will be joining, JetBlue's BetaBlue plane has expanded its in-flight e-mail, and Virgin America used gadget fetishes to pull itself into a "premium" niche.

And if some airlines have their way--heaven forbid--you might be able to keep using that cell phone right up into the air.

(Credit: New Line Cinema)

United Airlines has been subject to some pretty bad press recently for being one of several airlines to slap a $15 fee on checked bags, but here's a perk: the commerical carrier announced on Monday that it's starting to install iPod and iPhone connectivity features in its airplanes.

More specifically, owners of Apple's media devices can hook them up to the planes' in-flight entertainment systems; they can navigate through music and video on the seat back televisions while charging the devices in the process. The connectivity technology has been manufactured by Panasonic Avionics.

United is the first U.S. carrier to provide this service, it said in a statement. Late in 2006, iPod manufacturer Apple announced that it had struck a deal with the airline--as well as fellow domestic carriers Continental and Delta, as well as overseas carriers Air France, Emirates, and KLM--to configure in-flight iPod connectivity.

For United, the iPod cables won't be everywhere immediately. For the most part, they'll be installed on planes that make transatlantic flights, and in some cases will be restricted to those with first- and business-class seats. The first "iPod flight," United 936, will take off at 5:40 PM EDT on Monday in Washington, D.C., and fly to Zurich, Switzerland.

So, D.C.-to-Zurich pond hoppers: you can can now watch Snakes on a Plane on a plane (on an iPod, without draining your battery).

Every day it seems we get little closer to being fully wired--or unwired, as the case may be--in midair. And we think it's about time.

No longer flying solo

(Credit: Apple)

A day after iPass said it would provide in-flight Wi-Fi roaming, Singapore Airlines announced that it is now offering connectivity for iPods and iPhones on its "KrisWorld" in-flight entertainment system on its Airbus A340-500 planes, according to iLounge. That means you can plug the devices into the system with a standard 30-pin connector and then watch your own video on a personal 15.4-inch widescreen LCD (there's one at each seat in the section) or listen to your playlist on its noise-cancellation headphones, which will break in to tell you when you have to shut it off, presumably.

Other airlines have offered this kind of system, such as United, but they're still relatively rare. Plus there's always a catch, and in this case it's called business class. But it's a start. Just don't expect your precious gadgets to get a similarly warm welcome on ATA Airlines anytime soon.

Some airlines have been allowing BlackBerrys to be used as electronic boarding passes and soon standard cell phones will follow.

Now there is news of the iPhone being used to board a plane. Blogger Gerald Buckley writes about how he was allowed to board an American Airlines flight from San Antonio to Dallas by having the gate agent scan the bar code of the ticket on a PDF displayed on his iPhone.

Don't think you can waltz quickly to the gate by flashing your iPhone, though. Buckley makes it clear that he showed TSA his paper boarding pass to get through security.

Southwest Airlines announced Wednesday that it plans to begin trials of satellite-to-airplane broadband Internet service sometime this summer.

Spokeswoman Marilee McInnis said Wednesday morning that initially Southwest plans to test the service on four planes. But because the airline's planes fly many different routes, she did not anticipate--at least not yet--that travelers would be able to plan to fly on one of those planes.

Southwest Airlines plans to begin trials of satellite Internet service this summer.

(Credit: Southwest Airlines)

That means that in the early going at least, the service--which will allow passengers to access the Internet if they have their own Wi-Fi-enabled laptops--will be available at random.

McInnis did not say if Southwest's service would limit what kind of sites or applications passengers could access, as does JetBlue's recently added service.

But she pointed out that because the service is satellite-to-plane--whereas JetBlue's, for example, is ground-to-air--it would ensure consistent connectivity, even over water.

It's not entirely clear what benchmarks Southwest will use to determine the success or failure of the trial. McInnis said that the airline will examine whether the technology works and whether it performs according to plan.

As a frequent Southwest traveler, I guess I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it would be great to have connectivity while on the go. On the other, as many have discussed previously, bringing Internet to the few places where it's not currently available limits the places you can get away from work.

Still, I suppose I'm in favor of the advance. Now if only airlines can work on bringing power outlets to all seats--not just those in business or first class--so that those of us in coach flying long flights can power up the whole way.