DATE: Thursday, July 17, 1997               TAG: 9707170518

SECTION: BUSINESS                PAGE: D1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY LON WAGNER, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: NORFOLK                           LENGTH:   55 lines

NORFOLK AIRPORT FIRST TO OFFER BOOTHS FOR ACCESSING INTERNET

There it sat, the ``phone booth'' of the future. Plopped down right in the present, right in the middle of Norfolk International Airport.

The phone booth of the future is actually an Internet kiosk called CyberFlyer. A traveler can plop into a seat in the CyberFlyer, swipe a credit card through a slot, and send or receive e-mail, tap into airport information or check out sites on the World Wide Web.

The cost: about 33 cents a minute.

Norfolk International Airport is the first airport in the country to host a CyberFlyer booth, provided by a Denver company operating under the same name. Norfolk International boasts of being the first airport in the world on the World Wide Web, and Wednesday it added bragging rights of being the first to offer public Internet access.

Airports in Dallas-Ft. Worth, San Francisco and a handful of others have Internet kiosks on a trial basis, but haven't permanently installed them, CyberFlyer Technologies president Julie Jacobs said.

The CyberFlyer booth in the Norfolk airport is that company's first anywhere, but Jacobs says they expect to have 800 installed internationally within 12 months.

The Norfolk Airport Authority sought out CyberFlyer after Executive Director Kenneth R. Scott contacted a couple of telephone companies asking if they could provide a forum for public Internet access. They couldn't, he said.

``It was late last year and I started to see people sitting around on the floor where they could find outlets for their laptops,'' Scott said.

He then called Acoustics Development Corp., the St. Joe, Mo., company that makes many of the phone booths in airports. They knew about CyberFlyer's plans and put Scott in touch with Jacobs.

The booth itself has an industrial age look: a flat-screen computer monitor embedded in curvaceous stainless steel walls. The computer connects to the Internet with a direct-access line, and also has a data port connection for business travelers who want to plug in laptops.

Norfolk International is trying to keep those travelers happy, and boost its own revenues. CyberFlyer paid for the booth and installed it, and will pay the airport authority 20 percent of its revenues.

In Norfolk, more than 45 percent of its 2.8 million annual passengers are business travelers, the authority says. Nationally, 6 million business travelers take a total of 19 million trips, CyberFlyer says.

``Business travelers are the ones that have the need and the money to pay for it,'' Jacobs says.

And don't worry about cash - CyberFlyer takes four brands of credit cards. ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photo]

MOTOYA NAKAMURA/The Virginian-Pilot

Kenneth R. Scott, executive director of Norfolk International

Airport, left, sits in a CyberFlyer booth while airport visitors

also log onto the Internet. KEYWORDS: TECHNOLOGY INTERNET

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