It's nothing to do with the age of the aircraft, and everything to do with choices made by the aircraft operator. Just what is provided in the way of services at each seat depends on what the operator specifies, but just about every aircraft being flown today could provide payphone service if the operator so desired; the cabins are all wired, and there is rack-mountable equipment that can easily handle a few hundred phone handsets.
My guess is that it simply wasn't being used, and the space taken up by the handset could be used to provide other options (such as a seatback TV screen) that were more desirable to the end user. Nowadays, as some have noted, you can get a phone integrated into the hand-held controller for the seatback entertainment system, but that's still an expensive option, and one that could well be made obsolete in a year or two by services such as in-flight WiFi or even allowing use of cellphones during flight, both of which are being tested by a few operators today. On Mon, Oct 15, 2007 at 01:11:45PM -0400, Igor Roshchin wrote: > > David, > > While you are right about the interference reason, the second > statement, I believe, is not accurate. > > I am not sure how long ago you have flown, but the trend I see is that > those phone are removed from the modern aircrafts. > As a matter of fact, none of the aircrafts I've flown this year > (over 40 flights on American, Continental, Delta, Finnair, Frontier, > Southwest, S7, Estonian Air) had built-in phones. > > Igor > > > Sun Oct 14 11:31:48 EDT 2007 > David Savage wrote: > > > What? Terrorists? > > > > Airliners are concerned about the possibility of radio/navigation > > equipment interference, hence the shielding reference. > > > > That's why every seat on most modern aircraft have built in payphones. > > > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > [email protected] > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow > the directions. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
