Twelve years ago, I worked with a man who bragged about logging on to CompuServe on a domestic airline flight. Apparently, he Velcro-ed an acoustic coupler to the in-flight phone receiver, dialed long distance, and did his e-mail somewhere over the Rockies. He was so pleased with himself that he then went into a chat room (they called them channels on CompuServe) and bragged about it.

We all thought this was ridiculous in half a dozen ways. How stupid would it look to his fellow passengers to see a man strap two rubber cups to an airphone? How annoying would the squeals and white noise of the "modem mating call" be to his fellow passengers? How many lurkers on the chat channel would believe a guy typing "Hey, guys, I'm on an airplane!" And then there was the cost: He must have paid 5 bucks in CompuServe connection charges and more than three times that for the phone call (and this was pre-Web dollars, when 20 bucks really meant something). And with that jerry-rigged hardware, he'd have been lucky to connect at 9,600 bits per second.

But beneath the veneer of ridicule, everyone was secretly jealous that he'd done it before we had. Jacking into cyberspace in a shallow orbit around the Earth...how brilliant was that?

The second-largest airline in the world has finally been granted permission to provide wireless Internet access on domestic flights in United States airspace.

So it was with some joy that I discovered last week that the second-largest airline in the world has finally been granted permission to provide wireless Internet access on domestic flights in United States airspace. Well, sort of. In fact, the FAA granted permission to United Airlines and its airphone service supplier Verizon to install Internet-access hardware on one class of airplanes.

They don't yet have permission to use any channels on the radio spectrum to hook up the fuselage to the Internet. But that's on its way in a few months, and for now, baby steps are a good thing. Or they would be, if half a dozen airlines hadn't been offering the service since the spring of 2004.

WLAN, meet your airplane
Lufthansa's Flight 452 was the first commercial flight with high-speed Internet access, and it flew out of Munich on May 18, 2004, one week shy of a year after the service was announced. Using a satellite Internet connection managed by Connexion by Boeing, it provided paying passengers with all the joys of being online, with none of the downtime that most people need away from the call of the office. Soon afterwards, Scandinavian Airlines and others followed suit.

United and Verizon are likely to use the same basic architecture that Lufthansa and the others use: Wi-Fi hot spots in the fuselage let notebooks and PDAs hop onto a satellite link to the Internet. In order to get permission to install a radio network in an airplane, United and Verizon Airfone had to demonstrate that the signals would not affect any of the systems onboard. They did that with a demonstration system in one of United's B757-200 aircraft, which pretty much clinched FAA certification to proceed--but only for B757-200s.

Because satellite is an expensive way to go, lots of content gets cached on a proxy server onboard the plane, and only when people hit less common sites or do their e-mail does the connection jump to satellite and onto the Net at large. No doubt there will be a few little tricks to steer people to the content that's already onboard. Many hot spots redirect browsers to their own home page, and a few judiciously placed links should be enough to divert bored passengers to cached content.

Airplane meets Internet
But this is just the kind of redirection that stage conjurers use. The real business of getting online, the kind that business folk will leap on, is exchanging e-mail, and that involves a jump that United and Verizon Airfone have not yet hammered down. The spectrum of radio waves for satellite communication falls under another authority, the FCC, and as yet, that jump has yet to be made.

For United to connect its passengers to the Internet, it must first connect its B757-200 fleet (and subsequently, other airplane models) to communication satellites, which relay data to Internet gateways on the ground. To do this, the airline plans to hold an air-to-ground auction to pick service providers to close the air-to-ground gap.

	For United to connect its passengers to the Internet, it must first connect its B757-200 fleet (and subsequently, other airplane models) to communication satellites, which relay data to Internet gateways on the ground.

So when can we expect to get service running on domestic flights? It took Lufthansa 51 weeks from announcing its Internet access plans (May 27, 2003) to launching its first connected flight. Things are likely to move slightly faster now that the precedent has been set, but don't expect it by Christmas or the New Year. Some time in 2006 is all we're hearing so far.

Cramped passengers, meet another distraction
But will it be worth the wait? On the face of it, mile-high Internet access is a mixed blessing. For cash-strapped airlines, it's another way to wring money out of passengers who are already paying for stodgy food and headphones. It's also a fix for jonesing type A business passengers who need to set up office everywhere they plant their posteriors. For ennui-soaked tourists, it's another way to avoid conversation with the stranger in the next seat.

But assuming that United charges the same as Lufthansa ($9.95 for half an hour or $29.95 for an entire trip), is it really a good deal? Is it worth depleting the charge on your notebook battery to get a quick communications fix or click-around? Can you really enjoy getting online when the jerk in the seat in front may plunge your laptop into your solar plexus with an ill-timed recline?

It all depends on how long you're airborne and how much you need to be online. Even Connexion by Boeing seems to think plain old Internet access is a bit thin for the prices it's charging. It has begun to expand its offerings on Lufthansa to include streaming video from TV networks. This summer, it will debut as many as five TV channels, including CNBC, BBC World, and sundry European networks on some Singapore Airlines flights.

At this point, I'm beginning to get déjà vu to the early 1990s, when my colleague dialed up to get online while airborne. How quickly would I get buyer's remorse (or fear behind-the-back ridicule) if I dropped 30 bucks to channel-hop until my notebook batteries gave out? Perhaps mankind should spend its time in the air flipping through its undemanding reading matter in the old wood-pulp format.

Have you logged on with Lufthansa? Surfed with Scandinavian Airlines? Fantasized about getting back at the guy in front who crushed your kneecaps as he reclined by typing out 70 words a minute? Tell us in the TalkBack section below.