Thanks to Katie Umehira for sending it to us!

Source: USA Today
Author: Kevin Maney

It's only a matter of time before there is a Skype-related casualty aboard an airplane.

Let's say you're on an airliner, just settling in for a long flight. The little bag of Snack Mix lands on your tray table and you wonder what, exactly, is the make-up of those brown twig things stuffed in among the pretzel nuggets.

About then, the flight attendant says it's OK to use "approved electronic devices." These include laptops, portable video games and MP3 players. But the flight attendant, as usual, warns that no one is allowed to turn on a cellphone or any wireless communication device.

Which is good, this cellphone ban. Not for the official reasons they tell us. Who really believes a cellphone signal is going to scramble cockpit controls and bring down a jet? If flying were that tenuous, nobody would ever leave the ground.

The cellphone ban is good because it prevents passengers from getting pummeled.

The cellphone ban is good because it prevents passengers from getting pummeled. Especially passengers who believe they're so important they must be on the phone every minute of their existence. The pummelers would be those louts' fellow passengers.

So in that way, at least, the cellphone ban saves lives.

But these days, there is a new wrinkle. Say you're on El Al or maybe SAS or Lufthansa - one of the airlines that offers broadband Internet during flights for about $30 a trip. There are a lot of positives. You can do e-mail. You can get some Christmas shopping done. You can watch videos of curling.

But then the guy next to you boots up Skype. This is software that lets people make free or cheap phone calls over the Internet. Other software does this, too, including Yahoo Messenger.

Your seatmate connects to someone and starts talking. Maybe he has a headset - or maybe he doesn't, and you have to hear both sides of the conversation as the other person crackles out of the laptop's speakers.

There are no rules against this. It's not a cellphone conversation. He is not using a BlackBerry or any unapproved electronic device. He's on a laptop, on the plane's Internet service, using software to make a phone call.

There's not much you can do. You're trying to read, but the guy is inches away from you in your coach seat. You feel the bile rising in your gullet. You read the same sentence six times, but all your brain takes in is the conversation next to you. And then the guy breaks out a webcam.

He clips it to the top of his laptop so he can videoconference - because Skype, Yahoo and similar services make this possible. You glance over and realize that you, too, are in the picture, and your hair is a mess.

You can't take it anymore. You look at the other passengers and see the annoyance on all their faces. The Skype guy talks on. He talks about how his company needs to reorganize and that Max in accounting will have to make do with a smaller staff and -

BAM!

A carry-on suitcase crashes onto the Skype guy's head, driving his face into his keyboard and knocking him cold.

A carry-on suitcase crashes onto the Skype guy's head, driving his face into his keyboard and knocking him cold. You look around but can't tell who did it. There are grins on other passengers' faces, and blissful quiet. You crunch on a brown twig and go back to reading.

A fantasy? Hardly. People really are starting to make Internet calls on flights, though so far it doesn't seem that anyone has been attacked for it. People are bragging about "air Skyping" on the Web.

Edward Vielmetti does exactly that on his blog. Vielmetti runs The Vacuum Group, a networking service in Ann Arbor, Mich. "I spoke with Valdis Krebs this afternoon, who was high over the Atlantic flying SAS on his way home from Eastern Europe," Vielmetti writes.

Krebs is the developer of InFlow, which he bills as "software for social network analysis," whatever that means.

"He was talking to me using Skype, and not paying anything extra for the call," Vielmetti writes. "Skype sound quality was as good as ever - he didn't have a separate mic and was just using the built-in on his Mac PowerBook."

Factor in airplane noise, and you have to believe that Krebs was just about shouting into his laptop to make that work. How pleasant for other passengers.

"Folks, I'm sorry to tell you that 35,000-foot Skype calls to grounded companions is now passé," writes Stuart Henshall on Skype Journal, an independent site about Skype. Henshall also notes that "quiet zones may well become important" on flights.

Remember when airliners had smoking sections? Maybe we'll wind up with talking sections. Preferably behind a wall in the back of the plane. Or on the wing.

As often happens, technology is opening up unintended consequences. Back when Boeing unveiled its Connexion in-flight Internet system, or when Lufthansa and other airlines adopted it, no one talked about air Skypeing. They talked about e-mail and Web surfing - both quiet activities.

They didn't talk about gambling, either. Earlier this month, the CEO of Irish discount carrier Ryanair said he was interested in setting up a system that would let passengers use their cellphones or BlackBerrys to connect to an on-board gambling network - which presumably would connect to Internet gambling sites. Ryanair would get a cut of the proceeds. The CEO, Michael O'Leary, said he'd make so much on this that he could afford to give free tickets to gamblers.

By the way, Ryanair's concept says a lot about the dangers of cellphone use on planes, no?

The airlines, as far as I can tell, haven't talked about some other intriguing possibilities once they have in-flight data networks.

For instance, the network might be a way to make new friends. If you go to a high-end conference, you're often invited to join a social networking site for attendees.

The idea is that you fill in some information about yourself, and the system helps you find people at the conference who have similar interests.

Why not do that among the passengers on a 12-hour jumbo jet flight to Beijing?

That way they could collude about how to take out the guy making the Skype call.