American Airlines is equipping most of their mainline fleet with satellite internet over the course of the next year.
American’s regional fleet is going to remain equipped with Gogo’s air to ground internet. However they still have planes without any internet at all. Those planes don’t have any sort of inflight entertainment, either. And it turns out American doesn’t plan to add internet to their 50 seat regional jets. Period. At least that’s what American Airlines is telling employees:
Best I can figure American follows the Talmudic requirement for a minyan prior to offering inflight internet. They believe there must be at least 10 adult Jewish males onboard each flight. And with a regional jet that holds only 50 people, there’s just no way to consistently meet that requirement —
even on a route like New York LaGuardia – St. Louis that sees an Embraer ERJ-145 six days a week.
Seems to me that the logic is that small jets fly short routes but with AA they put the RJ’s on long routes like MCI-LAX or the STL-NYC route you mention. I’m OK with no wifi on the plane for short routes like the main short hops in Texas that I use AA for as an example.
It is difficult to do any serious laptop work on planes with small seat pitch/recliners and even worse on an RJ.
Best I can figure American follows the Talmudic requirement for a minyan tprior to offering inflight internet. They believe there must be at least 10 adult Jewish males onboard each flight. And with a regional jet that holds only 50 people, there’s just no way to consistently meet that requirement —
even on a route like New York LaGuardia – St. Louis that sees an Embraer ERJ-145 six days a week.
I know your being tongue in cheek but I can’t follow this at all. Please explain you sarcasm to a gentiles
Thank you
Gary UA is equally terrible in this regard. I know AA is pretty bad lately but UA is right there with them on many issues.
Wait, r u saying it’s not Kosher or something? Airplane wifi, if the hardware is cheap enough, should be on all the planes. It is so easy to control consumption based on altitude, customer payment, whatever, that they should make it available to at least match what Greyhound and Megabus already have.
@Trujeffie
I’m a religious Jew who prays with a Minyan (10 people) when its available, and I’m having trouble piecing this together.
Once AA switches over the wifi, will the gogo passes from American Express no longer be useful on the airline?
Yawn.
Exactly 90.1% of passengers don’t use Wi-Fi (source: Gogo SEC filings). The 9.9% who do are all bloggers.