AirTran’s Wi-Fi service

Illustration: Emily Flake

WI-FLY My sister Claire is one of those sedation-required, panic-attack fliers, so when we recently hopped on a flight to Florida, I was glad to see signs on our jet encouraging us to try AirTran’s Wi-Fi service. A perfect distraction, I thought. Claire was a wreck as we reached cruising altitude, so I opened my MacBook and cooed, “Now, sister, settle down. I’ll hook you up with some nice celebrity gossip.” Before we made our way to TMZ, though, my browser directed me to Gogoinflight.com, where I entered my credit-card info and agreed to the $9.95 fee to experience the joys of in-flight Internet. The pages loaded a little more slowly than on the ground, Facebook chat ran a little patchy, and it was a race against time to update our statuses (“Amalie Drury just paid $10 to post this status at 30,000 feet!”) and check the weather for our vacation, since my battery was running low. But we did learn of Kourtney Kardashian’s surprise pregnancy on that flight, so I guess it was worth it. Later that week, Gogo e-mailed a “tell-us-what-you-thought” survey. “Too expensive!” I wrote. “$3 a day would be more reasonable.” But did I get sucked in again on the return flight? You betcha.

Other airlines that offer inflight Wi-Fi:
American Airlines, select flights
Delta, select flights
Virgin America, all flights
Coming soon:
United (later this year), Air Canada (later this year), Southwest (early 2010), US Airways (early 2010)

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