iPhones to be provided to United Airlines flight attendants

United Airlines to deploy Apple's iPhone 6 Plus to more than 23,000 flight attendants worldwide

United Airlines on Wednesday announced that it will equip more than 23,000 flight attendants with Apple's iPhone 6 Plus next year, allowing them to handle onboard transactions as well as accessing company email and other internal information.

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This looks to be some of the fruits of the Apple+IBM partnership:



Brief article here:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2014/12/business-time-apple-and-ibms-partnership-yields-its-first-apps/

Specially with relatively reliable on board WiFi becoming available on all planes it would really empower them to be much more effective.

I find the network connectivity in flight very useful to get truly upto the minute info about what is happening to my connections, what gate they will be at, relative to my arrival gate, and a host of such little useful pieces of info. Now they will be able to help passengers with such info too.

I thought they would have already replaced their printed operations manuals with at least i-pads like the pilots have....

but they don't need but a fraction of the material the pilots do, so the i-phone should be sufficient....

It's a great idea. Gives flight attendants a lot of knowledge and ability to help passengers at their fingertips and it replaces those clunky point of sale devices.

And instead of sitting on the jumpseat reading People magazine, they can instead sit on the jumpseat playing Words with Friends!

trainman74 said:

And instead of sitting on the jumpseat reading People magazine, they can instead sit on the jumpseat playing Words with Friends!

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Or participate in AU or Facebook or whatever Specially if they get unrestricted internet connection for free.
I somehow suspect that won't be the case. They will get connection only through the App for App functionality for free, and to get an unrestricted connection they'll need to pay just like the passengers have to. I mostly spend my time in the United App and use the functionality available for free, and don't bother with paying for an unrestricted connection. Afterall mostly I want to see the map and get gate and status info, all available for free through the App. And of course the entertainment stuff over the local WiFi is also available, for free for now at least.

That internal WiFi really screams! It is incredibly fast. Not a jitter on HD movies I watched on my iPhone 6+ on the flight back from Newark last Saturday!

Yeah, I have a feeling that these phones will be restricted to only work with company Apps while in-flight.

Southwest also offers similar map, gate and status info for free on their inflight WiFi and it's really handy. If you're connecting, it's really nice to know what gate you're going to and if it's delayed before you land. They also offer free TV (live and on-demand) and it also works really well.

Another good experience was on Greyhound's BoltBus, they also offer free movies streamed from an on-board server. I was able to watch Life of Pi in HD with no jitters.

That's why I'm a big proponent of Amtrak looking into having an on-board server full of movies/TV shows if they ever decided to expand WiFi to the long-distance routes.