Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Ryanair in-flight phone service suspended

My new job requires me to travel. The first few months were mostly spent in Italy, back and forth every week. I cant complain, it's a job, many people dont have one, and the travel has reduced a bit lately, less training and more Irish customers.

Unfortunately the days of fancy business travel are long gone so I was on the Ryanair cattle truck. Scrambling for seats and hoping on a Friday night to not be sitting close to the stag parties being fed booze by the cabin crew.

On several of the flights we were supposed to have the in-flight phone service. The one that allows you to make calls and send/receive SMS. It is xpensive but the gadget nut in me wanted to try it out and send a message from the plane to tell my fiancee I was on the way home. Unfortunately I never got it to work. The signs were lit up, the announcer would tell us that it was available on this flight but my iPhone never connected or even saw the network.

Now I hear that Ryanair have terminated the contract with their supplier and are seeking tenders from other companies. I'm not surprised. If people cant connect it's just a chunk of useless hardware eating up some of Michael O'Learys jet fuel.

Despite wanting to play with it I hope they never get it fixed. It might be novel and worth trying, just once, but the idea of sitting on a plane for 4 hours with a stag party behind me sending txt messages and some business man beside me shouting down his blackberry over some contract or sale sounds like my idea of the lowest level or Ryanair hell.

1 comment:

RizqySultanAlfaroby said...

HP is not enabled on the plane because it is one of the factors causing the crash, which clashed with the HP signal and communication signal control setting until the aircraft is still widely debated and discussed by the flight engineer, I was dreaming when in a plane we can communicate by phone and SMS and can communicate with the Internet network, I am sure we will go in that era