As more planes get outfitted with Wi-Fi, getting online at 35,000 feet will be as ubiquitous as long security lines at airports. Chances are, if you’re flying on a major airline on a busy route, you’ll most likely have access to inflight Wi-Fi. Although Jetblue has been slower than other airlines in rolling out this new onboard feature, that doesn’t mean it can’t celebrate it. To promote its “Fly-Fi,” Jetblue repainted one of its Airbus A320 planes with a binary code livery.
Binary code, of course, is the “1” and “0” instructions that computers and many electronics use to encode data. As Wi-Fi is associated with computing, it’s rather fitting. Like all Jetblue planes, this particular A320 has been given a name: “CONNECTED TO 01000010 01001100 01010101 01000101”, which translates to “CONNECTED TO BLUE”.
According to the company, a third of its fleet of A320s have Wi-Fi equipment installed, adding about 10 planes to the list each month. It plans to have all A320s equipped with Fly-Fi by year’s end, and all of its Embraer planes by the end of 2015.
Unlike older inflight Wi-Fi systems, which use ground-based telecommunication towers, Jetblue is using the Ka-band satellite network, which is eight-times faster, the airline says.
