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: Settling himself into the first class seat of an overnight flight to Heathrow, investment banker A M Shah was hoping to make some last-minute calls from his BlackBerry. He had exactly 10 minutes to do that before the airhostess requested everyone to switch off their cellphones. As he hurriedly finished shooting off orders to his staff back at the head office, Shah wondered whether a time would come when he could use his PDA mid-air to catch up with his colleagues.

That time is here. Well almost. Moves are afoot to allow air passengers to use their PDAs (personal digital assistant) and cellphones during the entire course of the flight. Air France has become the first airline in the world to offer an in-flight mobile phone service. Flagged off at the fag end of last year, passengers travelling on board an Airbus A318 aircraft operating on the European routes can now send and receive SMSes, MMSes, emails via all cellphones with internet access. During the second half of the trial, passengers will be able to make and receive phone calls. Closer home, Kingfisher Airlines’ long-haul passengers will follow in the footsteps of the Air France fliers in 2009, all thanks to OnAir’s mobile telephony system.

The way it works

The passenger’s BlackBerry, phone or other PDA connects to the OnAir system via a mini base-station on the aircraft, based around a picocell (a smaller version of a regular cellular base station), which picks up signals from PDAs and phones and sends them to a satellite. From there, they go to OnAir’s ground network, then out to the passenger’s usual telephone network. This process takes only a fraction of a second. Passengers’ mobile phones only emit minimum power, thus not interfering with aircraft avionics or ground telecom network. To make a call on board the aircraft, passengers simply dial the international prefix (+) or 00 + country code + full number (without the 0).