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Passengers working wirelessly over Atlantic: fight report follows ...

The picture below was taken on the first wireless Internet flight, organised today by Lufthansa and Boeing from Frankfurt to Washington DC.

It could become the source of serious disputes between passengers and airline, however, if Lufthansa sees it as a self-funding exercise.

The airline is launching "Lufthansa Flynet", with satellite connectivity to the plane, and today's was the first flight with live (if not all paying) airline passengers.

An excited memo from the airline said that "passengers will enjoy high-speed connectivity from laptop computers ... they'll be able to surf the web, send and receive e-mails with family, friends and business colleagues, and otherwise enjoy the so-called 'riches of the Internet'!"

But the cost of the satellite link isn't trivial, and after a three month trial period, passengers will be charged an extra fee for use of the Internet while in flight. And that could cause passenger misbehaviour.

While Internet connectivity isn't free, a lot of people expect it to be. And while it may cost an airline extra, the sort of person who is prepared to pay nearly $2,000 for a return seat, business class - or even more, first class - is not the sort of meek and mild, non-complaining, non-aggressive type who will say: "Ah, another twenty bucks! - who cares?" Instead, they tend to raise their voices to full bellow, and say: "You cannot be serious! Give me a break! - I'm paying you two grand for this seat, and you want to charge me twenty bucks extra for two emails?"

Lufthansa says that its Internet service will be available to everybody in the plane. Of course, if a majority of the 300-odd passengers on a Jumbo take the offer up, it will mean significant new revenue. If, however, it's only the business class passengers who want it, the experiment could be abandoned quite soon as an extra cost.