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Comment by minimaxir | Hacker News Reader

Apparently on Virgin Airlines there are chat rooms on the planes. Those have only two practical use cases: dating, and trolling: https://twitter.com/KrangTNelson/status/959907806622121984

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I use it frequently both to talk to folks in my party who got seated elsewhere, other friends who are coincidentally on the same flight (common when traveling for conventions/conferences).

I also know folks who have arranged large group bookings (30+ passengers going to the same event) and found it useful to talk to each other.

One practical use is talking to people you're on a flight with but not say next to. I can't say I'd be a regular user of that feature, but I do find myself on flights like that from time to time.

If you're all online anyway, wouldn't you already know how to reach those people?

That's IF you all pay extra for in-flight WiFi, and assuming the plane's network link is working. (Many planes' WiFi use a cellular-based network link that has occasional dead spots. Satellite linking is only available on newer planes.)

Whereas seat-to-seat chat is free and relatively reliable.

"If you're all online anyway" is a reasonably sized caveat. I often don't bother buying in flight WiFi because you can't do all that much with it.

I used the chat on a KLM flight to Canada recently, it was neat. You could also chat with a specified seat number, and they would get a popup on their screen that you want to initiate chat - it was very useful as there was a large group of us travelling together and I could just chat with someone without walking to their seat on the other end of the plane.

This has been around for years. Besides messaging, there was a plane-wide chat. Pretty fun to ask people how first class is :)

I suspect the primary use case is talking to fellow passengers with whom you already have a relationship. But maybe not. I've never used it.

Something people seem to miss every time this comes up.. every airline I've seen this on (Qantas, Emirates, Cathay Pacific, American Airlines, etc).. require you to enable receiving messages before someone can send you a message.

Thus you can't just randomly message any seat on the plane until they turn it on.

I saw a similar feature at least ten years ago elsewhere. I'm not sure of the airline but it might have been Air France. It was more basic - think SMS - and you could do voice calls as well. I figured it was meant for people who were traveling together but who were not sitting together.

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