[Stevvo]

A bus is generally a far more pleasant experience. When taking bus you are not herded like cattle into pens based on priority queue status. When a bus has technical issue, they don't hold you hostage on-board for hours to avoid paying compensation. in Europe, a long-distance bus has the comfort of a business class airplane seat.

[blell]

Just the fact that people can’t talk on the phone whilst on a plane makes it infinitely better than a bus.

[vosper]

Starlink on flights could put an end to this

[scottyah]

hooray for technology!

Multiple lifetimes of thousands of the most brilliant engineers collaborating, sharing algorithms, protocols, mining, smelting, developing tooling to create tiny rocks that can think and blasting them to hover over the earth just so we can slightly annoy the person next to us with a conversation about the weird stuff growing between our toes.

[Analemma_]

From a technical standpoint, the ability to make VoIP phone calls from planes exists right now, at least on planes with newer and better internet connections. It hasn't been enabled because of ferocious customer opposition every time the idea is proposed. Which, frankly, is just fine with me. People can still send emails and messages from in-flight Wi-Fi, no need to subject everyone else to your phone calls.

[ruszki]

Could? I flew a month ago on a flight with Starlink. I downloaded 10s of gigabytes of data without hiccups. Calling was not an issue. And it was completely free.

[jonasdegendt]

Quite curious, which route was this on?

Not one time have I had a consistent internet connection whilst flying transatlantic on Delta, KLM or BA airplanes, to the point that I regretted having paid for it every single time.

[hdgvhicv]

I haven’t been to India for 7 years but I distinctly remember a very productive flight from Delhi to Heathrow on wifi while I was sshed into a machine and working on something for hours with no issue - far better than the signal I get on the train from London to Manchester.

[ruszki]

Qatar/Virgin Australia, Sydney->Doha. I’ve never had really good connection either before this, and I tried many-many times. That was the exception when it worked as intended.

[hdgvhicv]

Phones in seats have been a thing for decades, WiFi has been a thing for 10-15 years.

[mdhb]

Do you not own a pair of headphones?

[aiiotnoodle]

Having been trapped on a 2 day flight to Madeira via Madrid, Porto and Porto Santo, eventually your powerbanks and headphones run out of charge.

EU621 comp was denied because the aircraft could not land due to wind.

I did spend about 12 hours in a fancy all inclusive on ryanair's dime (a bus arrived at the airport un-announced to the airport staff or us customers) while some slept in airbnbs and on the floor.

[ruszki]

You can reimburse your costs of unplanned overnight stay, even when it happened because of weather. So those AirBnBs were also free. Even the taxi to and from there. Ryanair was unlawful if they hadn’t given this information.

Btw, there are power banks and headphones which can easily handle 2 days.

[hdgvhicv]

Surely you can recharge them on the ground too. Do Ryanair not provide in seat usb sockets? Wouldn’t surprise me if they saw an opportunity to charge £5 for their use (log into wifi and activate them etc).

[ruszki]

Especially that it’s completely normal to talk with each other on planes.

[AndrewKemendo]

The infrastructure for air travel requires all that for safe travel

As a pilot myself I know why all the holds exist and while not perfect, the majority of complaints aren’t random bullshit they are flight safety issues

The fact that people demand luxury because it went from veblen good to commodity is the problem

[Stevvo]

Different airlines have different policies. e.g. others you don't get stuck waiting on the plane because they don't load passengers while a mechanic is still working on the avionics.

[carlosjobim]

Do you love that bus so much that you want to sit in it for 30 hours?