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Comment by resf | Hacker News Reader

For a short-haul flight I agree. Wifi provides little benefit, and being disconnected can actually be a blessing.

A long-haul flight is so much more pleasant with wifi. There's only so many movies I can watch (for me, 1 or 2) before I get bored out of my mind.

It can get lonely on a plane if you are traveling alone. The people around you aren't always willing or able to talk (they may be asleep, don't speak English, or are preoccupied with a movie), so you may end up sitting for extended periods with nobody to talk to.

Being able to chat to friends while in the air makes the experience more comfortable than any seat ever could.

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To each their own I guess. I have no problem spending a long flight without conversation. Some movies/TV shows/books/games and (preferably) a comfortable seat and I'm set. Give me the choice between a business class seat without WiFi and economy with WiFi and the former gets my vote every time.

Out of curiosity, how do you define a long flight? I've found that most Americans call a flight "long" if it's 4-5 hours. But in my circles -- London-based, doing business in Asia -- "long" means 9-13 hours. Which is qualitatively very different.

(Mind, in those circumstances, a choice between being able to stretch out in business class vs. having WiFi in coach would tilt even harder towards the former. But after about 8 hours in the air, I do find a lack of communications really starts to bite.)

I fly to both Europe and Asia from the US east coast. Yeah it's boring but mostly because I'm more or less stuck in a seat and not because I'm cut off from email, Facebook, and Twitter. Though, for context, I mostly work remotely so not having a real conversation over the course of a day isn't that unusual for me. The boredom of a long flight is more that I can't go outside and walk around or fiddle around in the kitchen than that I can't communicate with someone.

I agree with movies getting borinng after a while, but what about games (those with more complexity than solitaire)?

For example, there's plenty of RPGs of all flavors and settings that would have you exploring, conversing, and battling. Many don't have high system requirements, either, so could be comfortable to play on a netbook or tablet.

Edit to add another idea: I know some flights have games you can play with people in the seats next to you. Why not a plane-wide chatroom of some sort on a web portal? Then you could textually converse with many people without bothering anyone and without any bandwidth/latency restrictions.

I agree entirely, it's hard to do much productive (or not productive) work without WiFi these days. If you're building a little side project you need access to third party APIs etc, or some documentation.

> There's only so many movies I can watch (for me, 1 or 2) before I get bored out of my mind.

How about downloading e.g. some tech talks? Or video lectures?

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