Wireless Intranet Coming to Air China (If You're Excited, Read That Again)

Flying in China, like flying anywhere, can be an exercise in frustration, especially when you plane spends hours circling the airfield because there was some minor storm that somehow delayed everything by hours and hours. How to while away those hours? Well, soon enough, if you’re on an Air China flight, you might have a chance to while them away on an intranet that — to be perfectly honest — sounds almost as boring as just sitting there.

The service, which will begin testing on Air China flights out of Beijing starting this Friday, ‘might not cost anything,’ according to Air China staff. Computers and tablets can connect to a wireless server in the cabin, but there’s no connection to the real internet, so this will provide access only to onboard content, which is apparently being furnished by the Civil Aviation administration. It’s possible that it will also be possible to connect to the real internet through the onboard server and a satellite link, but if that’s the case, it’s definitely going to be expensive.

This news is the product of an April agreement between Air China and China Telecom, and speaking as a passenger, I have to say, it’s pretty boring, but it has potential. Intranets — Local Area Networks — are useless for all of the usual reasons you might browse the web (reading news, checking mail, using SNS, etc.) but they are good for one thing: gaming.

So, Air China, I know it sounds crazy, but hear me out on this one. Instead of being known as being the first Chinese airline to provide some crappy intranet on flights, you could be known as the geniuses who brought us the in-flight LAN party. Counterstrike showdowns at 30,000 feet? Awesome. The League of Legends mile-high club? Yes, please.

Of course, they’ll probably ignore me and we’ll all be stuck with some crappy intranet on our flights, the digital equivalent of the in-flight magazine. But until then, a man can dream, can’t he? A man can dream…