Airfone was an

air-ground radiotelephone service Air-ground radiotelephone service is a system which allows voice calls and other communication services to be made from an aircraft to either a satellite or land based network. The service operates via a transceiver mounted in the aircraft on des ...

developed by MCI founder

John D. Goeken John D. "Jack" Goeken (August 22, 1930 – September 16, 2010)Bowley, Graham (2010), ''New York Times'', September 18, 2010, retrieved 2010-09-20 was a prolific telecommunications entrepreneur born in Joliet, Illinois. He was the original found ...

, and operated under the names ''Airfone'', ''GTE Airfone'', and

Verizon Verizon Communications Inc., commonly known as Verizon, is an American multinational telecommunications conglomerate and a corporate component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The company is headquartered at 1095 Avenue of the Americas ...

Airfone. Airfone allowed passengers to make telephone calls (later including data modem service) in-flight. Airfone handsets were often located in the middle airliner seatbacks, with two handsets per row for 6-wide coach seating configurations, and more or less depending on the aircraft layout and fare class. First class cabins typically had one handset per seat. Some planes had one or more bulkhead mounted phone stations with cordless handsets that the passengers could use, instead of the multiple wired handsets. Airfone phone calls were usually quite expensive compared to ground-based telephone calls, costing $3.99 per call and $4.99 per minute in 2006. The original Airfone main office and

network operations center A network operations center (NOC, pronounced like the word ''knock''), also known as a "network management center", is one or more locations from which network monitoring and control, or network management, is exercised over a computer, teleco ...

are located at 2809 Butterfield Rd, Oak Brook, Illinois. The

remains at this location. Bell Mobility used the Airfone technology on

Air Canada Air Canada is the flag carrier and the largest airline of Canada by the size and passengers carried. Air Canada maintains its headquarters in the borough of Saint-Laurent, Montreal, Quebec. The airline, founded in 1937, provides scheduled an ...

flights, but branded its service as Skytel (no relation to the Verizon-owned paging firm of the same name).

Use

Calls were often discounted or free for customers of airplane-based catalogs like Sky Mall, and

Verizon Wireless Verizon is an American wireless network operator that previously operated as a separate division of Verizon Communications under the name Verizon Wireless. In a 2019 reorganization, Verizon moved the wireless products and services into the div ...

subscribers could pay $10 per month and 10 cents a call or a flat 69 cents per call with no monthly fee. Airfone could be used for very slow modem calls, and attempts at data service were made in 2003 and 2004 using an on-board email proxy server. Many of the in-flight calls made by victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks were made over Airfone and Air One. Airfone's primary competitor was Air One, operated by

AT&T Wireless AT&T Mobility LLC, also known as AT&T Wireless and Trade name, marketed as simply AT&T, is an American telecommunications company. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of AT&T, AT&T Inc. and provides wireless services in the United States. AT&T Mobi ...

division Claircom Communications Group, and was available onboard

American Airlines American Airlines is a major airlines of the United States, major US-based airline headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas, within the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex. It is the Largest airlines in the world, largest airline in the world when measured ...

Northwest Airlines Northwest Airlines Corp. (NWA) was a major American airline founded in 1926 and absorbed into Delta Air Lines, Inc. by a merger. The merger, approved on October 29, 2008, made Delta the largest airline in the world until the American Airlines ...

, and select

Delta Air Lines Delta Air Lines, Inc., typically referred to as Delta, is one of the major airlines of the United States and a legacy carrier. One of the world's oldest airlines in operation, Delta is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. The airline, along w ...

aircraft. The Air One service was discontinued in 2002.

History

Development

The Airfone was originated by

(who also founded

MCI Communications MCI Communications Corp. (originally Microwave Communications, Inc.) was a telecommunications company headquartered in Washington, D.C. that was at one point the second-largest long-distance provider in the United States. MCI was instrumen ...

and FTD's Mercury Network) in the 1970s.

Western Union The Western Union Company is an American multinational financial services company, headquartered in Denver, Colorado. Founded in 1851 as the New York and Mississippi Valley Printing Telegraph Company in Rochester, New York, the company cha ...

purchased a fifty percent share in Airfone in 1981 and sold to

GTE GTE Corporation, formerly General Telephone & Electronics Corporation (1955–1982), was the largest independent telephone company in the United States during the days of the Bell System. The company operated from 1926, with roots tracing furth ...

in 1986 for US$39 million cash.

offered the United States's first public air-to-ground telephone system with Airfone. The first iteration of Airfone service only permitted air-to-ground calls and frequently dropped calls. A new generation dubbed GenStar was developed jointly by GTE and IEX Corp. in 1992. IEX developed the software, which ran on hardware built by Stratus Computers. GenStar introduced the capacity for airborne nodes to also receive calls, and for connections to be handed over between ground cells as the aircraft moved through them, reducing dropped calls. Handsets also gained screens and jacks for fax transmissions.

Demise

The head of the Airfone division told ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

'' in 2004 that only two to three people use the Airfone service per flight. In May and June 2006, the frequencies (

bandwidth Bandwidth commonly refers to: * Bandwidth (signal processing) or ''analog bandwidth'', ''frequency bandwidth'', or ''radio bandwidth'', a measure of the width of a frequency range * Bandwidth (computing), the rate of data transfer, bit rate or thr ...

) over which Airfone operated were sold at auction by the

U.S. Federal Communications Commission The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that regulates communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable across the United States. The FCC maintains jurisdictio ...

(FCC) to two new licenseholders,

Aircell Gogo Business Aviation (formerly Aircell) is a division of Gogo Inflight Internet is a provider of in-flight broadband Internet service and other connectivity services for business aircraft. It is headquartered in Broomfield, CO. Gogo Business ...

and

LiveTV LiveTV was a major provider of airline in-flight entertainment systems. Originally a joint venture of Harris Corporation and BE Aerospace (BE Aerospace's interest subsequently sold to Thales Group), it was a wholly owned subsidiary of JetBlue ...

. Under the terms of the FCC order that authorized the auction, Verizon received a non-renewable license until 2010, but had two years from the end of the auction to redeploy Airfone to use less bandwidth and share spectrum with one of the license winners. On June 23, 2006,

Communications, Airfone's parent company, announced that they would be discontinuing their Airfone service on all commercial flights by the end of 2006. They cited the declining use of the service, as well as a desire to focus on their key businesses: broadband, wireless and wireline services. Airfone service was installed on 1000 aircraft belonging to

United Airlines United Airlines, Inc. (commonly referred to as United), is a major American airline headquartered at the Willis Tower in Chicago, Illinois.

and Continental Airlines.

US Airways US Airways (formerly USAir) was a major United States airline that operated from 1937 until its merger with American Airlines in 2015. It was originally founded in Pittsburgh as a mail delivery airline called All American Aviation, which soon ...

and

have removed all Airfone handsets from their planes. Verizon will continue to provide service on 3,400 private and government aircraft. On December 28, 2007, Airfone announced it would discontinue service effective December 31, 2008 unless it successfully concludes negotiations with

, an affiliate of

JetBlue JetBlue Airways Corporation (stylized as jetBlue) is a major American low cost airline, and the seventh largest airline in North America by passengers carried. The airline is headquartered in the Long Island City neighborhood of the New York C ...

, to take over the business on that date. On June 9, 2008, JetBlue announced that it would buy Verizon's Airfone service. The sale of Verizon Airfone to LiveTV (JetBlue) was separate from the sale of the bandwidth that Verizon Airfone used for its operations. In another transaction, LiveTV acquired about 1/3 of the original Airfone bandwidth from the FCC.

LiveTV continues in-flight voice for general aviation

For a time

offered, nationwide, mobile telephone style voice service to general aviation aircraft. This service was identical to the original Verizon Airfone service. However, because of the change of

allocation, all of the existing Airfone transceivers in the aircraft were required to be replaced.

Sale to Aircell

In April 2013,

acquired LiveTV's Airfone business unit, and announced that in order to support capacity-expansion for the Gogo Biz in-flight Internet service, the Airfone service was permanently decommissioned on December 31, 2013.

References

External links

Verizon Airfone website

Jack Goeken By Larry Hooper From the November 08, 2000 CRN

Airfone Transition web page.

Aircell statement on transition.
{{Webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131105135153/http://www.aircell.com/press-room/aircell-completes-airfone-acquisition , date=2013-11-05
''Chicago Tribune'' article on GoGo purchase of Airfone assets.
Telephone services Avionics Mobile radio telephone systems Verizon Communications