Citing sources within the aviation industry, ABC News reports an overzealous TSA employee attempted to gain access to the parked aircraft by climbing up the fuselage... reportedly using the Total Air Temperature (TAT) probes mounted to the planes' noses as handholds.

"The brilliant employees used an instrument located just below the cockpit window that is critical to the operation of the onboard computers," one pilot wrote on an American Eagle internet forum. "They decided this instrument, the TAT probe, would be adequate to use as a ladder."

They harass innocents:

James Robinson is a retired Air National Guard brigadier general and a commercial pilot for a major airline who flies passenger planes around the country.

He has even been certified by the Transportation Security Administration to carry a weapon into the cockpit as part of the government's defense program should a terrorist try to commandeer a plane.

But there's one problem: James Robinson, the pilot, has difficulty even getting to his plane because his name is on the government's terrorist "watch list."

It's easy to sneak by them:

The third-grader has been on the watch list since he was 5 years old. Asked whether he is a terrorist, he said, "I don't know."

Though he doesn't even know what a terrorist is, he is embarrassed that trips to the airport cause a ruckus, said his mother, Denise Robinson.

[...]

Denise Robinson says she tells the skycaps her son is on the list, tips heavily and is given boarding passes. And booking her son as "J. Pierce Robinson" also has let the family bypass the watch list hassle.

And here's how to sneak lockpicks past them.

Eye-Fi raises $11m in second funding round: I don't cover companies' financial dealings often, but Eye-Fi is always worth highlighting, as they appear to be the only smart entrant in the entire universe of cameras-with-Wi-Fi, and they're not even a camera maker. Camera makers have typically limited or straitjacked the onboard Wi-Fi. Eye-Fi's now three models of SD cards with Wi-Fi built in have a pretty wide range of controls and abilities. I tested out the Eye-Fi Explore recently, which pairs Wi-Fi GPS-like positioning from Skyhook with Wayport hotspot access, and the review appears in Saturday's Seattle Times. Eye-Fi's biggest challenge is better camera integration, so that cameras can handle power management in discussion with the card; camera makers have to not feel threatened by Eye-Fi's smart technology, though.

I wish I was so high with some guy in the sky: In today's Mobile Post, I talk about the big event today: American Airlines flying the first commercial flight since Connexion shut down with broadband onboard. It's a test; it launches commercially in a few weeks. More in the post.
]]> Wed, 25 Jun 2008 05:22:12 +0000 post mobile post american airlines commercial flight broadband onboard launches sky test connexion Mobile Post: Fly Me http://securityratty.com/article/fba75567f05d200e4b90db62a99f554c http://securityratty.com/article/fba75567f05d200e4b90db62a99f554c American Airlines will fly its first commercial round-trip with Aircell's Gogo service active tomorrow: On Wednesday, 25-June-2008, in-flight broadband briefly flickers back to life with a JFK to Los Angeles round-trip flown by American on which passengers will get free use of the onboard, in-flight Internet service via Wi-Fi. The test flight is a kind of soft launch, which will be followed in a few weeks by full-on service.

American will offer Gogo on its 15 Boeing 767-200s, which means all JFK-LAX routes and some JFK-SFO and JFK-MIA (Miami) routes. The test will likely stress the system because more people will get on than on a typical flight since they won't be paying, and I would guess a lot of people will immediately try streaming video just to see if it works.

The full-on launch is still a pilot project even though it involves so many planes, routes, and passengers.

BoingBoing's Xeni Jardin asked me to participate in an interview call today with execs from Aircell and American Airlines, and I've written up the full account for their site.

Among other interesting tidbits I learned today, the onboard systems have 800 GB of capacity for future expansion--streaming media, most likely--and the AA-configured 767-200 has power outlets scattered around coach, and at every seat in first and business class.

Jardin notes that Virgin is thinking about what gets cached on planes. I would note that the idea of onboard media and caching servers is a great one, because it means that passengers could ostensibly stream or purchase downloadable digital content; and that whenever an airplane lands, its servers could automatically suck in at 802.11n speeds from a gate-mounted access point all the latest data to cache, including video.

On the cost of fuel to carry the Wi-Fi gear--probably a total of 200 pounds of dead weight and drag, based on information that Aircell and others have been giving out--I may have been close tot the mark when I suggested it was $50 for a cross country flight a few days ago.

The excellent Scott McCartney, author of The Middle Seat column in The Wall Street Journal, ran down the numbers on 10-June, and he says LAX-JFK costs about $500 per passenger when all the costs are figured out. But that includes all fuel divided by average passenger count: that is, the weight of the plane, everything in it, and its drag are all contributors.

That means that an added couple of passengers due to the availability of Wi-Fi; their willingness or the overall willingness to pay slightly more for the flight (which would be even fuller if more people want on); and the airlines' cut of a dozen or sessions per flight could clearly outweigh the gas cost.

The writer says that air-to-ground service is like Wi-Fi in the sky, but it's using cellular data standards, and so it's much more like mobile broadband in the sky. He also writes that there's 3 Mbps, which is the combined up-and-down estimated throughput of AirCell, the only firm that can operate such service in the U.S. for commercial flights. The next graf mentions that satellite-based Internet access is coupled with, uh, 802.11b (yes, B) access points. I think that's an error, innit?

And the analysis of JetBlue's move is incorrect. The purchase of Verizon's Airfone network is about positioning equipment, not using out-of-date gear that can't be employed for phone calls on commercial airliners.

I'd suggest a more appropriate metaphor be used than the one in this sentence: "[Lufthansa] hopes the experience is more fruitful than its ill-fated 2004 deal with Boeing's Connexion service, which crashed and burned when Boeing shut it down two years later." Beyond the distasteful reference, Connexion was shut down in an orderly fashion, and Lufthansa was one carrier that loved it, and tried to get it to stay in operation, and, failing that, to build a consortium to revive it.

The article finishes with a set of incorrect conclusions:

"There hasn't been much news about how airlines plan to charge for these services." In fact, we know pretty much that it will cost roughly $6 an hour, $10 for a 3-hour flight or less, and $13 for a flight longer than 3 hours. That's from Aircell in various statements, and it appears to be roughly the charges expected from its competitors in the US. In Europe, mobile calls and texting prices are also known: about US$2.50 per minute for calls, and something like 25 to 50 cents for text messages, not much more than the egregious ground pricing.

"If the industry's cash crunch gets much worse, in-flight broadband might be mothballed before it even gets off the ground." It's unclear what part of the expense the airlines are bearing. In my discussions with firms over the last five years, it's clear to me that this round involves the providers bearing more of the cost--and hence the lower installation cost involved--but also retaining more of the revenue.

Wi-Fi a-go-go onboard buses: The New York Daily News checks in on the trend to put Internet access via Wi-Fi on board East Coast buses. The article notes that Greyhound's new sidewalk-pickup BoltBus service among corridor cities has provoked the long-running Chinatown buses to bolt on Wi-Fi as well. The Chinatown Bus Association says here that their bus tickets are cheaper and thus more competitive--but one of their members has already added Wi-Fi, and others are considering it. MegaBus also serves the coast and has Internet access, as well as DC2NY. The biggest problem, though? Passengers demand AC outlets, and only BoltBus has them on every bus. LimoLiner (New York to Boston) isn't mentioned here, but is one of the earliest firms I'm aware of with on-board Internet, starting in 2004, and they also have power to every seat.

Ostensibly this purchase allows JetBlue a faster and simpler path into operations. Whether it's worth it to JetBlue is hard to tell, except that they will likely be marketing this service to other airlines as a differentiator. It will be lower bandwidth than AirCell, but could be likewise cheaper and used for shorter-haul flights.

Verizon notes some of the technical details of their service's business status on a FAQ for their corporate customers, which has an oddly large amount of business detail. Verizon was obligated within two years of the end of the auction for the spectrum they occupied with their very inefficient narrowband analog service to cease operations on those frequencies. That date is about now (the certification of the auction results was close to two years ago), and Verizon clearly worked out the details to allow current customers to maintain continuity through the spectrum vacation and into JetBlue's hands on January 1.

As I noted a few days ago, a few sources had already tipped me that JetBlue's test aircraft with Wi-Fi onboard and email was using the ancient Airfone network, which is capable of slow dial-up modem speeds, rather than using the 1 MHz which could conceivably carry over 500 Kbps of data in each direction per plane.

JetBlue won a sliver of air-to-ground spectrum in auctions in 2006 through their LiveTV division. This should allow them to offer low-speed services, including email.

However, a little birdie told me that JetBlue's test is using the old analog cell network downlinks--that's right, 1990s technology that provides a trickle of bandwidth. This is what the Tenzing JetDirect service, briefly available before the airline industry collapsed, used for connectivity.