IT IS HARD to say who has it worse during long-haul air travel: a smoker without a cigarette or an Internet junkie separated from his e-mail fix.
Fortunately for the latter, the days of yearning for your in-box are numbered.
In the coming months, airlines will conquer the final frontier of disconnectivity and offer Internet services to their passengers. For those who cling to the online world the way a child does to his favourite blanket, the move has been a long time coming.
'I wish they would just hurry up,' said frequent flier Mark Phibbs, general manager for Microsoft in Hong Kong. Like many business travellers, Mr Phibbs finds his time in the air to be highly productive. What he lacks is e-mail. With gadgets available that let people stay online whenever and wherever they want (except in a plane), e-mail has become almost as critical to communications as the telephone.
So the case for Internet access on aircraft would seem easy to make. Boeing says three million people board 42,300 flights daily, and about half of all passengers are business travellers. The company's research also shows that in the United States, the world's largest aviation market, one in three passengers carries a laptop.
So what is the hold up? Three years after passengers were first teased with the promise of being airborne and online, carriers and aircraft manufacturers are only taking their first cautious steps towards offering the service.