Rory Cellan-Jones, the BBC’s technology correspondent, made a quick escape from the CES exhibition halls to try something new for the organisation – a live broadcast from a plane.

Unfortunately, things didn’t go quite to plan:

It was always going to be tricky to go live onto BBC World, and although we did manage to contact London, and they saw us for a minute, a software glitch then froze the picture. So we moved on to or next challenge.

The next challenge was a Skype video call, which worked perfectly – though the roar of the 1950s flying boat’s engines made it difficult for Rory and his colleague Maggie Shiels to have a proper conversation.

Alaska Airlines and Southwest have already signed to launch Row 44’s in-flight broadband systems later this year – and, in comparison to the (sadly retired) Connexion by Boeing system, installation times and costs are dramatically lower. Increased competition in the in-flight broadband market can only be a good thing

BBC makes its first Skype call from the air