Hello from bizjournals.com! David Mueller (davidm@smail.info) thought you might like the following article from Pacific Business News: Singapore Air puts text-messaging into jets ------------------------------------------------------------ Singapore Airlines has launched an in-flight short message system (SMS). The first flight to offer it flew from Singapore to Amsterdam on Tuesday and was to arrive in Chicago on Wednesday. The airline said in April it would invest $170 million over two years wiring its jetliners for websurfing, e-mail, onboard chatrooms and other cybernetic features. The SMS offering is a first step, the airline said. Passengers can send 160-letter messages to any cell phone or e-mail address. During three months of beta-testing the service is free on 10 jets. Air Canada has also been testing this kind of service. Two research and development teams in Seattle, one with a start-up company and another with Boeing, are fine-tuning systems to permit these functions in commercial aircraft. Both systems use store-forward technology that loads thousands of popular webpages before takeoff to reduce the number and size of actual page requests in-flight and speed load-up on sites that most people visit. Copyright(c) American City Business Journals Inc. All rights reserved. You can view this article on the web at: http://pacific.bizjournals.com/pacific/stories/2002/08/26/daily56.html