I was in New Zealand for a short trip over the weekend, and on the way back I picked up a new doohicky at the airport. It’s called the AirFly Pro, and from its name you can tell it was designed for use on airplanes. What is it? It plugs into any standard 3.5mm headphone jack and sends that audio signal over bluetooth to your wireless headphones. The obvious use case is on a plane – if you want to connect your AirPods to the in-flight entertainment, normally you are out of luck. With the AirFly, you can pair your AirPods to the AirFly, and plug the AirFly into the entertainment console, so you can now use AirPods, with all their noise cancelling features, with the entertainment system. Pretty cool! This also means you can use it with anything that has a headphone jack but doesn’t support bluetooth audio. This ranges from old devices, like OG iPods and Game Boys, to more recent devices that just don’t support the functionality. I used it at the airport with my Nintendo Switch, which was pretty cool to play that system with noise cancelling earbuds.

It was very easy to set up: I did it at the airport immediately after buying it. You press the button on the AirFly down until it starts flashing, then you activate pairing on your earphones or headphones (for my Beats Fit Pro 2, this was a button on the case). Then you wait a bit until both lights go solid. It took a while this first time, but on every subsequent use the AirFly remembered my Beats automatically, and the Beats would prioritise it over any Apple device I was using. I also didn’t then have to disconnect or anything to go back to using the Beats with my phone – it all just worked seamlessly, as usual. Once the devices are paired, you just plug it in and you are good to go. I tested it with my Switch, which was a really great experience. I never realised the opening of Mario Kart 8 is in stereo…

It worked great on the plane, to the point that the plane’s audio system could handle it (it got too crackly at the highest volumes, so I had to keep it a bit quieter than I would have liked, but this wasn’t a big problem). You need an adapter to plug it in to the dual-jack, which I had anyway. But you can go without if you’re OK with fiddling with it to get sound in both ears and the volume at the right point. It was cool to use the in-flight entertainment system – on the flight over, I had just been using my iPad. Unfortunately, I chose to watch Wonka, which was not a great choice but I can’t blame the AirFly for that. AirFly claims this has 25+ hours of battery, which would certainly last even the longest flights from Australia. It charges with any USB-C cable (even over PD, though it comes with a USB-A to USB-C cable), so it would be easy enough to charge somewhere in the airport during a layover. You could also plug it into the seat charger, if you have one, in a pinch, though then you can’t actually use it.

Some other cool features – you can connect more than one headphone to it, and you can use it as a receiver. Connecting more than one headphone means you can use it like a physical headphone splitter, so two people can connect to it and watch on one screen. Handy, yes, on planes but even on something like a Switch if you wanted to play it in public. I think you could even theoretically use it as a headphone splitter for a phone or iPad if you had the right headphone-charger connector, which is a roundabout way of doing it but could theoretically work (I haven’t tested it). Secondly, you can use it as a BlueTooth receiver. This means you can connect your phone to it and plug the AirFly into an aux port to broadcast from the phone. A potential use case – if you had a rental car and didn’t want to connect your phone over BlueTooth to it but still wanted to listen to music. You could plug the AirFly in to the car’s aux ports, and it would play your phone’s music through the car speakers, without having connected the phone to the car itself. It is roundabout and for me, has less use cases than the transmitting mode, but it is nice to have the option for this here. I haven’t tested either of these features but it is good to know they exist should I want to use them.

I don’t actually have any negatives of this device. Some people don’t like that it flops around, but personally I think that’s good design as it makes it flexible. On the plane I had it pressed against the cabin wall, on the Switch it hangs up. There are some competitors which have rigid bodies but I can see this being awkward if what you are plugging it into doesn’t quite fit neatly with the rigidity of the actual transmitter. Yes, there are similar devices for cheaper – but it is nice having the quality of buying this from a physical store and the associated warranty that you might not get (or, at least, it will be more difficult to get) from somewhere like AliExpress. This goes for around $90AUD, I got it for a bit less in New Zealand thanks to Duty Free and currency conversion. It’s expensive in some ways, but I think if you have a use case for it then you would get a lot out of it. I know I will be. And, when trying to travel light, things generally cost more initially but save you money in the long-run on extra baggage etc. This device saves you having to lug a heavy set of wired headphones or a bad set of wired earphones, instead allowing you to use your already good set of earphones that you were going to take anyway. What’s not to like?

Have you used any devices like this before? Or know of something similarly cool I should keep an eye out for? Let me know in the comments below.