Originally Posted by
Often1
It's not about whether the technology exists, it's whether it is worth equipping the card readers and the aircraft with the system and whether it is worth cutting into available bandwidth.
That all comes back to fraud risk. The machines can be stuck in a cradle within minutes of arrival and the payments batch-processed. There is always a fraud risk, but it may not be much.
Right. If the plane didn't already have Wi-Fi it probably wouldn't be worth it. But since there's already an Internet connection and they probably need to replace their equipment to support stuff like Apple Pay anyway, why not? Also, I don't think a credit card authorization takes up all that much bandwidth relative to what's available since satellite Internet is capable of something like 10 megabits per second per aircraft.