Hacker News Reader

Comment by gbin | Hacker News Reader

So clearly this is again an airline using a rule as a "proxy" for something else they want.

Like no chewing tobacco... Yeah it is gross but it is probably not a safety issue.

Flying is among the most dreadful activities I do. The whole thing is unsettling from the moment I pull up to the airport.

This is one of many absolutely ridiculous things the airline industry has enforced.

But.. I must fly places, so I just suffer like the rest.

Note that voip calls are prohibited even though you can get internet access. This is because of annoying other customers, not because of safety.

Wouldn’t it also be bandwidth consumption on a limited connection?

Perhaps on the upload but download bandwidth can seemingly deal with a plane full of people streaming Netflix these days, so that's not an issue.

Netflix on a plane? I have never seen that. Which onboard wifi allows that? Perhaps you are thinking of movies delivered via wifi, but the content is streamed from the plane itself.

Qantas has been able to do Netflix/Youtube/whatever on a plane with free wifi for several years. I'm not talking about onboard entertainment, which is a separate thing with a separate app (which is, on the domestic flights where free wifi is offered, largely obsolete at this point). It's not without momentary buffering issues, and I will tend to download things in advance for that reason, but 99% of the time it's pretty good.

I’ve been able to stream video on an Air Canada flight from Vancouver to London, afaik it’s the same GoGo satellite service that seemingly everyone else has.

Yeah they explicitly allowed movie streaming from basically any site but not voip.

There’s no way they had all the YouTube cached on the olane

Reply on news.ycombinator.com