  Wireless connectivity in airplanes is becoming more important, demanded, and
common. One of the largest bottlenecks with the in-flight Internet is that the
airplane is far away from both the satellites and the ground base stations
during most of the flight time. Maintaining a reliable and high-rate wireless
connection with the airplane over such a long-range link thus becomes a
challenge. Microwave frequencies allow for long link distances but lack the
data rate to serve up to several hundreds of potential onboard customers.
Higher bands in the millimeter-wave spectrum (30 GHz-300 GHz) have, therefore,
been utilized to overcome the bandwidth limitations. Still, the per-user
throughput with state-of-the-art millimeter-wave systems is an order of
magnitude lower than the one available with terrestrial wireless networks. In
this paper, we take a step further and study the channel characteristics for
the terahertz band (THz, 0.3 THz-10 THz) in order to map the feasibility of
this band for aviation. We first propose a detailed channel model for aerial
THz communications taking into account both the non-flat Earth geometry and the
main features of the frequency-selective THz channel. We then apply this model
to estimate the characteristics of aerial THz links in different conditions. We
finally determine the altitudes where the use of airplane-to-satellite THz
connection becomes preferable over the airplane-to-ground THz link. Our results
reveal that the capacity of the airborne THz link may reach up to 120 Gbit/s,
thus enabling cellular-equivalent data rates to the passengers and staff during
the entire flight.
