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Comment by deathanatos | Hacker News Reader

I'd add one more:

* The WiFi in the airport is hostile? No Fly.

I once tried to rely on a mobile boarding pass to get through security. The process required Internet access, and I wasn't able to pull it up.

It wasn't until I was on the other side of security (via a paper pass) that I realized the airport WiFi was falsifying DNS results, and that was preventing me from pulling up the pass on the mobile device. But handling "DNS server is reachable but being actively man-in-the-middled" wasn't a code path the developer had thought of (I know I wouldn't have…). I needed to open a browser and agree to some inane ToS or watch an ad, or something, before I could get unadulterated Internet access.

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Sorry, but where have you been for the last decade? This is how every free WiFi I've used all around the world has ever worked. It's not specific to airports.

> I needed to open a browser and agree to some inane ToS or watch an ad, or something, before I could get unadulterated Internet access.

This is pretty common for public WiFi.

I really like that I can add boarding passes to Apple Wallet and they're available totally offline. There's not a lot Wallet is good for (adoption is too low) but it's great at Boarding Passes.

Or just take a screenshot.

I absolutely never do this. Maybe because I'm paranoid, and especially if I'm flying internationally, I never, ever, feel comfortable handing my mobile device to security or Immigration. I still get a paper one every time.

I don't fly internationally much, but everywhere I've been in the US, my phone never leaves my hand. I place it on scanners at security/the gate.

In any case, as the other person mentioned, my phone is locked the whole time. The only thing in the wallet they can access is my boarding pass.

While I get your point this is really unnecessary when you fly within Europe. Specifically within the Schengen area.

Usually you don't hand your boarding pass to anybody. Instead you self-scan it once when you enter the passenger / transit area and a second time, when boarding the plane through a self-service gate.

This may vary by airport, but on most of my flights through a number of European airports access is pretty much automated.

You can access boarding pass while your phone is locked.

Sure, but that doesn't solve my (perhaps somewhat irrational) issue with physically handing my phone to people I don't really trust, especially when out of my home country.

I think that the only reason to use airport wi-fi is when you arrive from abroad and don't have a local SIM card yet, and your existing SIM card is for a plan that does not provide data roaming.

Otherwise, the mobile internet is vastly superior. It's even superior when it's the slow and expensive international roaming data plan. Airport's wi-fi can end up equally or more expensive and slow; I tried, both in Europe and in the US.

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