Flight Test: Porn and VOIP Confirmed at 35,000 Feet

Jalopnik’s Road Test Editor Wes Siler is currently at 35,000 feet, flying American Airlines from LA to NY. Since his Boeing 767 had the recently launched Gogo in-flight Wi-Fi, and since he was already using it to get his work done, we decided to see how far the service could go in terms of in-flight comforts.

Hunched over his MacBook in coach “like a T-Rex,” Siler was able to complete a battery of tests. The upload rate wasn’t shabby; 257 Kbps was enough to let him upload a Flickr gallery, for one thing.

Since Speakeasy.net reported a respectable 658 Kbps download speed, it was no surprise that Siler reported A-OK on the all-important mid-flight pornage test. He was able to stream some nice naughty material, as you can see (artfully blacked out by me) in the screengrab above. (That’s Wes, holding his ticket, in the Photo Booth shot next to it.)

The porn access should come as good news for people who fear that other mid-air nemesis, the Chatty Cathy: At least porn will keep some passengers distracted from voice chat, which worked all too well in our quick test. Truth be told, the only thing that didn’t work was video chat—iChat just kept choking and crashing. Hey, something was bound to fail as Siler hurtled through the sky high above Nebraska at an air speed of 935 kilometres per hour.

If you’ve had any interesting in-flight Wi-Fi experiences, by all means share them in comments. [AA; Thanks Wes!]

Update: Here’s how REAL it is—Siler just took a screenshot of this article while in the air and IM’d it to me: