[JayMillz]

WASHINGTON - Hopping the pond just got a whole lot more comfortable.

Virgin Atlantic has lifted its ban on using cellphones during flights. Now, passengers aboard Airbus A330 trips between London and New York can use their phones in the air.

The airline plans to expand this service to 20 planes by the end of the year, according to TIME.com.

Travelers will be able to send and receive text messages, as well as make calls and browse the Web, albeit slowly. Only 10 people can make calls at one time, Virgin Atlantic says, due to limited bandwidth.

The Telegraph reports this is part of a more than $160 million upgrade to the Airbus model.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/ne...calls.html

[Freedom]

So now business men can continue to work and girls can pretend to be busy when you hit on 'em.

[Handsome Creepy Eel]

Fuck. Don't you realize what this means? A stream of idiots tagging themselves on Foursquare as "Flying somewhere over the middle of Atlantic! So exciting!", and hipsters Instagramming the pictures of the dull gray/black stratospheric sky mid-flight.

[Brian]

i'm glad that people finally realized talking on a cell phone isnt going to crash a plane but i really dont want to have to listen to some idiot babbling when i'm on the plane

[Timoteo]

What it does is it allows people to do the thing that most do when they're bored - pull out their phone and call someone to engage in senseless yacking. Thankfully, the number of people that can talk at once is limited. Sure, you can always think of some kind of emergency scenario where someone HAS to make some kind of emergency call, but honestly, once you open this up people will simply invent reasons to make a call. As long as people do whatever with their phones QUIETLY, I'm cool with it. I just don't want to hear constant yacking throughout the flight.

[assman]

Quote:

WASHINGTON - Hopping the pond just got a whole lot more comfortable.

Seems to me it just got a whole lot worse. An enclosed cabin with no escape from cellphone conversations. I bet we will see some in flight violence as a result.