In order to meet the demands of 'Internet above the clouds', we propose a multiple-antenna aided adaptive coding and modulation (ACM) for aeronautical communications. The proposed ACM scheme switches its coding and modulation mode according to the distance between the communicating aircraft, which is readily available with the aid of the airborne radar or the global positioning system. We derive an asymptotic closed-form expression of the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) as the number of transmitting antennas tends to infinity, in the presence of realistic co-channel interference and channel estimation errors. The achievable transmission rates and the corresponding mode-switching distancethresholds are readily obtained based on this closed-form SINR formula. Monte-Carlo simulation results are used to validate our theoretical analysis. For the specific example of 32 transmit antennas and 4 receive antennas communicating at a 5 GHz carrier frequency and using 6 MHz bandwidth, which are reused by multiple other pairs of communicating aircraft, the proposed distance-based ACM is capable of providing as high as 65.928 Mbps data rate when the communication distance is less than 25 km.Award, and the Innovate UK funded Harmonised Antennas, Radios, and Networks (HARNet) are gratefully acknowledged. ultra high frequency (UHF) band has almost been fully occupied by television broadcasting, cell phones and satellite communications, including the global positioning system (GPS). Thus, no substantial idle frequency bands can be found in the UHF band either. This motivates us to explore the super high frequency (SHF) band spanning from 3 GHz to 30 GHz, for example, using 5 GHz carrier frequency for this aeronautical communication application. Note that even if there were sufficient unused frequency slots in the VHF and UHF bands, it is advisable not to use them because the frequency band of the envisaged airborne Internet access system should be sufficiently far away from the bands assigned to the safety-critical air control and management systems, satellite communication and GPS systems. ACM [9], [10] has been demonstrated to be a powerful technique of increasing data rate and improving SE over wireless fading channels. It has been extensively investigated also in the context of IEEE 802.11 [11], LTE-advance 4G mobile systems [12], [13] and broadband satellite communication systems [14]. The optimal ACM relies on the perfect knowledge of the instantaneous CSI, but channel estimation errors are unavoidable in practical communication systems [15]. Furthermore, the CSI of frequency division duplexing based systems must be obtained through a feedback channel, which potentially introduces feedback errors and delays [16]. These factors significantly degrade the ACM performance. In order to reduce the sensitivity to CSI errors, Zhou et al. [15] proposed an adaptive modulation scheme relying on partial CSI, while Taki et al. [17] designed an ACM scheme based directly on imperfect CSI. A whole range of differentially enco...