Surfing the Web at 40,000 feet

Derek Scally tries out an in-flight Internet service that could boost the fortunes of an industry still struggling after  September 11th.

The world's first flying Internet cafe has opened for business. Lufthansa, the German national carrier, is the proud parent of FlyNet, a high-speed Internet service that it has invited journalists to try at 40,000 feet on a flight to Los Angeles.

As we take off it's just as well we have the bells and whistles of the airline's new business-class seats to distract us, as our hosts have to sort out some technical problems. Once FlyNet is open for business, though, the race to get online begins. First out of the blocks is Melissa Lepor, a 10-year-old from Beverly Hills, who finds the aircraft's wireless Internet connection within five minutes and is online within 10. (And no, she's not a journalist. We are less impressive.)

The most difficult part for Melissa is convincing her father to part with his credit card. Passengers on long-haul flights can choose between two tariffs: $29.95 (€24.50) gives them unlimited use of FlyNet during the flight; $9.95 (€8) buys them 30 minutes online, with each additional minute costing 25 cents (20 cent).

"It's good," says Melissa absent-mindedly once online. I'm amazed by her blasé attitude to the technology that's allowing her to play a game with friends at home. As soon as I get online, though, I am just as blasé. Like all good technological breakthroughs, surfing the Internet from the air seems so obvious it's hard to believe nobody got around to doing it sooner.

A few teething problems aside, FlyNet is so easy to use and so fast that you start wasting valuable bandwidth by e-mailing friends a few rows away, forgetting the complex technology at work behind the scenes. The system uses a wireless local area network to send Internet traffic from your laptop to an antenna on the roof. It then bounces the data into space at up to five megabits a second, seamlessly switching satellite when it needs to.

I start working through my to-do list, sending emails, chatting with friends and even paying a few bills. Only the iTunes music store refuses to let me download a song. Next to me, Melissa's mother, Helen Lepor, is trading stocks and chatting with her stockbroker friends. "I trade on the stock market, so I can put in a full day when we travel," she says.

The commercial possibilities of FlyNet are huge: Lufthansa is developing an Internet portal to let customers book a hotel, rent a car and plan their entire holidays from the air.

The airline is coy about how much the system cost to develop, but it hopes its leap of faith will be a turning point after the catastrophic post-September 11th era, which drove airlines to the wall or left them struggling. Lufthansa's FlyNet partner, American Airlines, pulled out of the project early on, leaving the German carrier to carry the costs, take the risks and now, it hopes, bask in the kudos.

"People want to use their time on board in different ways: to relax, to read, to plan their holiday or send emails and do their banking. We've just expanded people's choices," says Thomas Ellerbeck, Lufthansa's head of media relations. The airline has bet a lot of money that its "quality and innovation offensive", based around FlyNet and the new business-class seats, will help it to differentiate itself from other airlines. "We always want to offer our customers something new. We want to convince people."

On the red-eye flight home I use the Internet for a while to pass the time, but in the end I am won over instead by my whizzy seat, which lets all six feet, four inches of me stretch out flat and sleep. The 12-hour flight is over in a flash. Now that's what I call Vorsprung durch Technik.