Cell phones on planes?

A report from Europe says that after years of debate over the use of mobile phones aboard airplanes in flight, the moment of truth has — very nearly — arrived.

Emirates installed satellite-based technology enabling voice calls and text messaging on one of its Boeing 777 jets late last year and expects to begin offering the service to passengers on a yet-to-be announced international route early next month.

The service has already obtained approval from air safety and telecommunications regulators in 25 countries in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, covering about 30 different routes that Emirates flies. The carrier expects to outfit its entire fleet with the technology within a couple of years.

A half-dozen other airlines, including Air France-KLM, Ryanair and Qantas, are due to offer similar services in Europe and Australia later this year. Travellers in North America, meanwhile, will have to await the conclusion of ongoing reviews of the technology by both the Federal Communication Commission and the Federal Aviation Administration.

So, with the technological and legal hurdles rapidly falling away, what can passengers expect from travel in the chattering class?

According to David Poltorak, President of AeroMobile, the British company providing the cellular technology to Emirates and Qantas, any GSM-standard phone will work on the system, provided the passenger’s mobile subscription includes international roaming.

Voice calls — which will only be allowed at altitudes above 3,000 meters, or 9,600 feet, to avoid any potential interference with land-based communications systems — will be billed at a rate of $3 to $3.50 per minute for outbound and inbound calls, with AeroMobile, the airline and the passenger’s mobile service provider each taking a cut.

AeroMobile says the cost is in line with existing intercontinental roaming charges, which range from $2 to $6 per minute.

If $3.50 a minute still sounds steep, consider the fact that calls made from existing airplane seat-back phones currently cost $4 to $5 per minute. Emirates, which has seat-back phones on its entire fleet of 100 planes, said its passengers make about 6,000 calls per month, for a total of 220 hours of talk time.

“People use them more than you would think,” said David Coiley, an AeroMobile spokesman.

George Cooper, Chief Executive of OnAir, a Geneva-based Airbus affiliate that is behind the Ryanair and Air France mobile phone projects, is equally confident about its market potential.  “The research we have done since 2003 shows with remarkable consistency that the majority of people want to be able to make voice calls,” Cooper said.

A survey commissioned by OnAir and published in September found that 80% of 2,413 air travellers polled in London, Paris and Hong Kong had a positive view of in-flight mobile phone use, with 54% of business travellers and 41% of leisure travellers saying they would like to make or receive calls.

But in other studies, passengers were far more equivocal. One online poll of 50,000 air travellers worldwide published in the autumn by Skytrax, a market research company in London, found that only 10% of passengers favoured mobile phone usage in flight, while 84% were firmly opposed.

Another survey, conducted in 2005 by Forrester Research, found that only 23% of 5,051 travellers in the United States and Canada wanted to be able make or receive calls while flying.

Cooper argued that passenger attitudes toward voice calls varied depending on  the length of the flight, adding, “A voice call on a short-haul journey tends to be part of the business day,” he said. “You are maybe travelling to or from a meeting and most of the people you are likely to call are in the same time zone.” For longer, intercontinental flights, the equation is more complicated, Cooper said.  “The people you’d want to call might be asleep,” he said. So, for that matter, might the passenger seated next to you. But both the AeroMobile and OnAir systems give the airliner’s cabin crew the ability to switch off the voice capability during the simulated “night” parts of long flights.

Moreover, aircraft base stations will be able to handle a maximum of only about five or six voice calls at a time. In case of heavy demand, additional calls will be placed in a queue, as is the case currently with seat-back phone systems.

Text messages, unaffected by the six-call limit or the quiet-time part of the flight, will be free to receive and will cost about $1 to send on AeroMobile’s system and 50 to 60 U.S. cents with OnAir.

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Report by The Mole