Offline productivity beats no connectivity at all

“Unfortunately WiFi will not be available on this flight, please complete your emails as we will shortly be departing.” "

Welcome, dear reader, back to the year 2025… when getting on a plane means total disconnection.

There are times when this is absolutely brilliant.

There are times when this is deeply inconvenient.

This is why, generally speaking (and up until recently), whenever I was heading to the Gulf, I would always, always travel with Qatar Airways and exclusively on their Starlink-equipped aircraft. Even if I was going to Abu Dhabi, Muscat or Riyadh, I would go via Doha… simply because it meant I was going to get at least 6 hours of work time ‘back’ compared to going direct.

It would tack on at least 2 additional hours of travel to allow for the local connection in the Gulf, sometimes 3. But for me, the productivity exchange was perfectly fine. Obviously when in Doha Airport, you can get a lot done anyway, but the key for me was being able to use a few hundred meg connection at 40,000 ft for the duration of my flight.

And so I find myself on a British Airways flight and the polite and efficient stewardess has just announced that the existing on air WiFi is not available. The good news is that they will, in due course, have Starlink soon!

"Time to download some email and do things… offline!