Is talking on planes the new mile-high menace? Qatar’s Starlink dilemma

Thanks to new and incredibly fast wi-fi, I was able to video call my kids from an international flight. But I was soon shushed by an airline hostess for being too loud. Who was in the right?

Using phones on the plane is a relatively new thing but is it what we want?

It was a definite thrill to be able to video call my kids from 35,000ft in the air on a plane, roughly halfway across the country. I was on Virgin Australia’s first international flight in partnership with Qatar Airways and it was equipped with Starlink. Qatar is rolling out the technology, which uses Elon Musk’s constellation of low-orbit satellites via his company SpaceX, to get extraordinarily fast and free wi-fi (they are obviously more successful with internet connectivity than rocket launches).

Chatting on the phone is not ideal for other passengers sitting around you.

I have never experienced anything like it and it was faster than my home wi-fi and my office’s combined. I could do everything that I normally do on the ground: check texts, WhatsApp messages, watch Netflix on my phone and mindlessly scroll Instagram. As the flight went on, I heard more and more of my fellow passengers make video calls to their loved ones, so I decided to do it as well. My eight-year-old and 12-year-old were suitably impressed with the Qsuite I was sitting in and we were having a fabulous chat until a Qatar flight attendant asked me to be quiet.

Qsuite doesn’t even provide enough space to muffle the sound of my voice.

“The passengers around you have complained about the loudness of your voice,” she whispered. Mortified, I hung up the phone and slunk back into my seat in embarrassment. The last time someone mentioned the loudness of my voice was my inner-city neighbours after many years of me yelling at my children. “Oh yes, I know the name of your son, Jack, I hear it quite regularly,” remarked the gentlemen who lives behind us in a rare over-the-fence chat.

But was I really that loud on the plane? I spent the rest of the flight eyeing off my fellow Qsuite mates to see who was the one to complain about the loudness of my voice but none gave me dirty looks.

Maybe it is better to be disconnected from the world on the plane.

I came to the conclusion that it was the actual exercise of making a video call that was loud – not me in particular – and this raises a whole debate about phone calls on planes. Do we really want this? Maybe we have taken for granted the joy of the quiet hum of the airline engines while on a long-haul flight? What is the etiquette of making phone calls? Should there be a time limit? Should they be banned?

A friend mentioned he had been on an international flight recently and a passenger had FaceTimed his girlfriend for three hours. It was excruciating for all involved. So, at the very least, airlines upgrading their wi-fi should be legally required to provide upgraded noise-cancelling headphones as well.

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