Would you pay $6 to be able to use instant messaging for the duration of a plane flight? Sounds like a good deal to me if you’ve got a few folks to yak at on the other end. The new service, JetConnect, is priced at a flat fee of $5.99, which seems cheap compared to the GTE Airfone charge of $4 a minute. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have “high-speed email” yet, and the service only offers news updated every 15 minutes to a central server. Of course, do you really need to check news more than every 15 minutes? Maybe I need to ask the people who trade stocks. I bet that there will also be “online” shopping. Connexion by Boeing, high-speed Internet access, is being planned for Lufthansa and British Airways. It’ll probably be a while before all airlines offer high-speed surfing, but that day can’t be far off.