  The near-IR HeI 10830A transition is a highly sensitive diagnostic for
non-LTE effects in the helium atom. So far, non-LTE line-formation computations
have failed to quantitatively reproduce observations of this line in the entire
range of early-A to late-O main sequence stars. It is shown that the non-LTE
modelling was insufficient, for the most part either because of inaccurate
photoionization cross-sections for the 2s 3S state or the neglect of line
blocking. New calculations based on state-of-the-art atomic data give excellent
agreement with observation for the HeI 10830 A feature, while profiles of the
HeI lines in the visual are retained.
