Project Stakeholder Management

Here’s an update to the Article on mobile phone usage in aircraft.

Emirates and AeroMobile announced a few days ago that the world’s first authorised cellphone call was made by a passenger during an Airbus A340 flight between Dubai and Casablanca. The call was made at cruising altitude, after passengers were permitted to make and receive both calls and text messages. Emirates are planning to fit additional aircraft with the cellphone system later this year. To minimise annoyance, the flight crew requested passengers to use phones on silent-mode and will shut off the in-flight service during long-haul night flights.

Qantas is also planning to allow cellphone usage during flight, but for SMS text messages only, after a nine-month trail period during which they received plenty of stakeholder feedback.

So different airlines have decided to offer different services, based on surveys and feedback:

• Emirates - full voice and text sms
• Qantas - text sms only

We’ll be watching to see how they manage passenger and other stakeholder feedback after full system deployment.