AMR Racing to Be First With In-Flight Web Service

Onboard Internet access on key routes from New York's Kennedy Airport may be just weeks away, as AMR(AMR) unit American Airlines rushes to become the first U.S. carrier to make wireless services available to a broad group of its passengers.

On Wednesday, American and partner AirCell took their system live for a day, testing Internet access on a round trip between Kennedy and Los Angeles. They looked "at the performance of the network to ensure that it operates the same way in real life as it has during the months of testing we've conducted," a spokesman said.

The carrier particularly wanted to see how Web services, such as browsing, streaming video and file attachment downloads, functioned during a live flight. During the coming weeks, assuming the test results are satisfactory, access will become available on all 15 of American's 767-200s, which fly from Kennedy to Los Angeles, San Francisco and Miami.

American is not the only airline that has tested wireless access on Kennedy flights. In December, JetBlue(JBLU), the principal carrier at Kennedy, became the first U.S. carrier to offer onboard email access, enabling passengers to use Yahoo! mail and Yahoo! Messenger Services with WiFi enabled laptops as well as smart phones such as the Blackberry 8820.

This month, JetBlue added access to Gmail, AOL Mail, Hotmail, Windows Live Mail, Microsoft Exchange-based corporate email accounts and to a customized in-flight version of Amazon.com.

The tests are confined to a single aircraft, an A320 named BetaBlue, which flies a variety of routes. More than 100,000 messages were transferred by BetaBlue passengers during the first six months of testing, said spokesman Bryan Baldwin. However, "we do not have a timeline yet for rolling this service out to other aircraft in our fleet," he said.

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