On the 777, is there a  phone in the cockpit where the pilot can call her husband to remind him to pick up the kids at school?  Does the flight attendants intercom phone also have ability to make a call?  I remember 15 years ago they used to have phones on the seat backs, that idea quickly died.  

38 minutes ago, paulyg123 said:

On the 777, is there a  phone in the cockpit where the pilot can call her husband to remind him to pick up the kids at school?  Does the flight attendants intercom phone also have ability to make a call?  I remember 15 years ago they used to have phones on the seat backs, that idea quickly died.  

There are sat phones, not sure if they are standard equipment or company option. Personal calls through the sat phone systems is something that most probably will not be welcomed from the company. I know of one example where the sat phone system on a certain company was deactivated because crews were abusing them.

The Interphone system can not do calls outside the plane, is used for calls between the crew.

 

Phones on seat back are still used, and these are also via sat phone, again the costs of making such calls is not cheap at all.

 

 

Our crews sometimes use the aircraft's wifi to text or make a call.  Not encouraged obviously due to data caps, etc..  

Satcoms is usually used to call dispatch. The dispatcher then can arrange a conference or transfer call to another party. There are only certain preprogrammed numbers pilots can dial. It also includes ATC numbers. If VHF or HF is not available then ATC instructs to call via Satcom. Often used in Atlantic and Russian cross polar routes. Some aircraft may have Satcoms which allow flight attendant to call Medical services if there is a passenger condition issues. For my entire career never heard that pilots would be able to call their family members.     

9 minutes ago, skysurfer said:

Satcoms is usually used to call dispatch. The dispatcher then can arrange a conference or transfer call to another party. There are only certain preprogrammed numbers pilots can dial. It also includes ATC numbers. If VHF or HF is not available then ATC instructs to call via Satcom. Often used in Atlantic and Russian cross polar routes. Some aircraft may have Satcoms which allow flight attendant to call Medical services if there is a passenger condition issues. For my entire career never heard that pilots would be able to call their family members.     

I made a call to my wife on OE while being instructed on the SATCOM.  There was the phone directory and the ability to dial a manual number.  I doubt the feature to manually dial was ever removed, its just barely ever used.

Most airliners (at least those that fly international routes) will have a SATCOM phone for use by the crew. Either via geostationary Inmarsat satellites, or via the low orbiting Iridium satellite constellation.

Inmarsat was the original satellite phone system, and requires a steerable dish antenna (usually mounted atop the vertical stabilizer). Iridium only requires a small patch antenna on top of the fuselage, similar to a typical GPS antenna.

For a long time, Inmarsat was the only approved satellite system for CPDLC text communication with ATC on overwater routes, which is why most aircraft that fly internationally have an Inmarsat dish. Iridium is now also approved for CPDLC.

The per-minute connect charges for Inmarsat phone calls are MUCH higher than Iridium, and Iridium works in polar regions, while Inmarsat does not - so Iridium is probably the phone system of choice for new installations.

Communications from the cockpit to company dispatch or maintenance are normally done via text through ACARS, which will utilize a VHF data radio when over land, or satellite when over water or in locations where there are no ground-based ACARS stations.

 

Back-in-the-day, with the phones in the back of the seat - or, even earlier, what was essentially a couple of 'pay phones' on the forward bulkhead in most PAA's 747-200B's for example, the fee was like $10/minute to make a call, I kid you not. I was surprised those things hung around for as long as they did...

I am surprised that they don't have phone in the cabin.  But to think about it, people would be yapping away about their crappy lives during the flight annoying everyone.  

On 8/25/2018 at 4:24 PM, PopsBellNC said:

Back-in-the-day, with the phones in the back of the seat - or, even earlier, what was essentially a couple of 'pay phones' on the forward bulkhead in most PAA's 747-200B's for example, the fee was like $10/minute to make a call, I kid you not. I was surprised those things hung around for as long as they did...

When Airfone first came out, there was a certain "holy cripes, I'm making a phone call from a freaking airplane" mystique to it. Remember this was when most people's phones were attached to the wall in the kitchen, and "mobile phone" meant "I went to Radio Shack and bought a 15-foot cord for it." A lot of us didn't even have cordless phones until many years after Airfones were around.

After the novelty wore off, a lot of the users were business people who were expensing the charges back to their employers, so they didn't care how much it cost. 😉

 

Edited September 7, 20187 yr by eslader

An airline of my relatives worked for had to remind flight crews not to use ACARS abusively - there were a number of messages being sent between aircraft on the freetext option slagging off the airline’s managers and all ACARS messages were logged by the company’s ops department!

As for phones in the cabin, what a dreadful thought. Being an airline passenger’s unpleasant enough without listening to some gob going on about how Dawn in accounts has got it all wrong and doesn’t know what she’s doing for 8 hours, like you get on the train.

Rumour has it that any pilot in the UK caught using a phone in flight will be fined £100 and get 6 points on their licence. 

Even more ludicrous from a safety perspective is the fact that when SAT phones were first introduced in the cabins of some longhaul airlines, the cabin crew would be able to call home from anywhere in the world and arrange to go out with friends when they got back.  At the same time the poor old pilots would be struggling to hear anything at all above the static on their aircraft's SSB HF radios - just to make a simple position report! 

17 hours ago, berts said:

At the same time the poor old pilots would be struggling to hear anything at all above the static on their aircraft's SSB HF radios - just to make a simple position report! 

Troops calling home from Viet Nam found their way to the base MARS station, usually run by volunteers, who would set up a SSB HF phone patch by contacting a ham near their home.  Sen Barry Goldwater operated a commercial grade HF ground station near his home in Phoenix and he would pay the toll charges for completing the call to the soldier's families.  This is how I first heard the cries of my newborn son.