Sending a Message to Plane
 

Is it possible to send a short Message for a Passenger to a plane?

This regarding a Family emergency?

Instead of waiting for the plane to arrive just send it before they arrive. Another 10 more hours before they land.

thanks

No you can't.

Best for you to call CX at airport that flight is coming in from and tell them the family emergency and get a rep to meet passenger upon arrival to deliver message.

Best for you to just tell passenger to call you/whoever rather than for them to hear whatever news it is upon arrival...

Not 100% true. I've had to deliver an urgent message to a relative on CX once - they were a senior citizen if that makes any difference - and the CX Station Manager sent what they call an ACARS?? message to the plane.

May help if the recipient is a senior or maybe an unaccompanied minor. No harm in calling the Station Manager and explaining the circumstances, at the worst case, you will have an airport rep meet the passenger upon deplaning.

As another poster said, it's certainly physically possible to do. Messages can be sent electronically to the cockpit over ACARS. The pilots can then print it out and give it to a FA to deliver to the pax. Whether you can reach someone at the airline willing to do that is another story. If you're expecting to need to communicate with a pax, you can have them setup the satellite phone to receive incoming calls on many international systems, though you'd need to arrange that with the pax ahead of time (and making and receiving calls isn't cheap).

If not prohibited by the destination authority (phones on board are disallowed on some routes, and I am not sure about other forms of communications), CX probably has the final say on whether or how the message can be delivered.

Personally, I feel that if the emergency can cause distress, it may be better to deliver the message upon landing. Otherwise it may cause a second case of emergency on the flight.

Yes.
We get ACARS messages all the time, sometimes with regards to PAXs.
How you go about getting the airline to ACARS the aircraft, I don't know..but it certainly happens.

I agree, what good can come out of delivering the message to the passenger? There is nothing they can do and will have to sit for another 10 hours worrying about the problem.

I suppose the pax could respond by spending a bunch of time in the lav which, these days, seems to cause a diversion.

But, yes, not much that can be done from the air unless being able to make satellite calls would help.

thanks much for that information