The other day my significant other convinced me that we should watch Die hard 2: Die Harder. on the NetFlix. I noticed one interesting aspect of the movie, when John McClane gets a page from his wife, who is flying in on a plane, and then he calls her back on the seat back phone. Part of their conversation involves a discussion of technology, and his lack of embracing it. It sort of sounded like a commercial for in flight telephone service–”It’s the 90′s, John!” I then realized I had never actually seen anyone use such a phone, and hadn’t heard anything about them in years.
Sure, they were a little expensive, and it’s hard to think of many conversations you really might want to loudly carry on while flying, but you could make a phone call–from the plane! Did anyone ever get much use out of these? Let’s embrace the 90′s and ask–what ever happened to in flight telephones?
Images from the Flickr of ensredshirt, blog.seattlepi.com, depletedcranium.com, ichizen.com, and jaunted.com.
1. High capital expenditure costs to install the systems in jetliners.
2. High cost of calls for passengers meant that calls were infrequent and short in duration, leading to little revenue.
3. For combined reasons 1 and 2, as aircraft aged out of airline fleets, replacement planes were not equipped with this undesired technology.
4. The 800 MHz air-ground spectrum was auctioned off by the FCC and reallocated in 2006. Verizon was left with a non-renewable license for a portion of that spectrum until 2010.
5. Passengers want seatbacks to contain entertainment like movies and music.
6. Eventually, in-flight wi-fi will be rolled out, then travelers will use other services, like Skype rather than a dedicated seatback phone.
I'm trying to do the data transfer math here. Twelve one page emails in a minute sounds like it would be maybe 1200 baud.