Flight Payment: When you travel by plane, you are not allowed to turn on the internet on your telephone/smartphone/tablet. But when you buy food items from the cabin crew, the attendants accept the payment from your card. This question may have come to your mind too. Actually, during the flight, passengers are asked to keep their phones in flight mode. In such a situation, how can card payment be accepted without internet service? Actually, due to the internet, the navigation system of the flight can be affected, due to which the flight can lose its way. For this reason, it is asked to keep the internet off. If you do not know about this, then today we are going to explain it to you in detail. 

1. In most airplanes, passengers are not allowed to use the internet. This means they cannot make online payments. However, air hostesses use a special technology called in-flight commerce (IFC) to accept payments from your credit or debit card.

2. The air hostess has a portable point-of-sale (POS) machine, also known as a swipe machine. This machine is not connected to the internet but already has the software and data required for payment processing.

3. You swipe your credit or debit card into the machine. The machine reads the card information and encrypts it.

4. Encrypted data is sent from the machine to a secure server via a cellular network such as GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) or GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications).

5. The server verifies the card information and the payment. If the payment is successful, the server sends a confirmation message to the machine. Talking about the benefits of IFC, it provides the facility to accept payments despite the lack of internet connectivity in airplanes. It is a safe and reliable method as the data is encrypted. It makes the transaction fast and easy.