Ryanair: In-flight mobile phone calls possible within weeks

Mobile phones, Transport
Share

plane-mobile.jpgYou know the drill. When you get on a plane, it’s all “Seatbacks up!”, “
Stow your tray tables!”, “The exits are here, here, and here!”, and “For the love of god, turn your phone off!”. Well, perhaps not any longer. Ryanair have outfitted ten of their planes with the capability to allow you to make in-flight phone calls.

Flying in the face of existing logic that says that the slightest text will send your plane dropping like a stone and crashing in a huge fireball, Ryanair reckon that they’ve managed to make a mobile phone mast small enough not to interfere with the plane’s important not-crashing-and-burning systems.

Ryanair’s deputy chief executive, Howard Millar, says that charges won’t be sky-high, they’ll be roughly equivalent to international roaming charges. “I believe the main demand will be for texting,” Mr Millar said. “We are also looking at selling mobile phone top ups.”

The facility is already available on a few other airlines, such as Emirates, all of whom decided a while back to wing it and see if they could persuade the European Aviation Safety Agency to allow them this functionality.

In my opinion it’s plane plain to see that unless the charges take a nose-dive from their current two-quid-a-minute price point, then it’s unlikely that people are going to want to use this functionality in anything but the most urgent circumstances.

Ryanair (via the Telegraph)

Related posts: Confused about in-flight mobile use? Key details here | Ofcom approves in-flight mobile use for UK and European mile-high texting

Duncan Geere
For latest tech stories go to TechDigest.tv

One thought on “Ryanair: In-flight mobile phone calls possible within weeks

  • This may seem like a good idea until someone suggests that a mobile phone could be a bomb and bans all phones on planes, just in case of a terorist threat…

    To be honest unless your a busines passenger, it’s quite peaceful on planes with no phones beeping or ringing…

    We managed for all these years without problems, why change it now?

Comments are closed.