Do you plan on flying home for the holidays? Are you looking forward to dealing with airport security and explaining to them why you have so many gadgets in your backpack? Maybe you’ll be bored out of your mind waiting to board your flight? Well, Google wants to lend you another friendly hand.

While suffering through flight delays, you don’t have to sit there and just twiddle your thumbs. That’s because Google is offering to pay for your Wi-Fi access in any of 47 participating airports across the United States.

“This is a very hectic travel season for people,” said Marissa Mayer, Google’s Vice President of Search Products and User Experience. “We hope that free Wi-Fi will make both traveling and connecting with friends and family a little easier.”

When you log into the Wi-Fi access page, you’ll be presented with a page that asks for a donation to either Engineers Without Borders, One Economy Corporation, or the Climate Savers Computer Initiative. If you make a contribution to any of these, Google will match it up to $250,000. The airport that generates the most donations gets an extra $15,000 to donate to a charity of its choice.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that this free Wi-Fi thing goes out of commission on January 15, 2010. Realistically, I think all airports should offer free Wi-Fi anyway. I know that Vancouver does.

Source: Intomobile