Online chat from 30,000 feet

Like a lot of air travelers, I’m enjoying the new wi-fi connectivity that we have on our flights. As I post this, I’m about 30,000 feet up on my way to Detroit from Florida on an Air Tran flight.

For $4.95, I have pretty good speed. I answered four e-mails from the office, got pinged on Skype by a news source who pitched a story to me and was able to conform some plans for dinner with friends.

I tried video chatting via Skype but it looked like the bandwidth just isn’t enough to lock up a solid enough image. Chat, though, works fine. Posted a status update on Facebook and got pinged by a couple more friends on AIM.

Same thing with AIM. Tried a couple times to connect without success. Tried Skype again and was able to get a video picture going of me and the guy I was talking too but the image locked up and eventually dropped.

I’m betting there is just too much latency to establish reliable audio/video. Or could it be that the airlines have intentionally found a way to limit such things?

How long do you think it will be before we get live video coverage from some incident aboard an airliner?

I snapped the above pic and posted this while online from somethere half way between Florida and Michigan.