Airfone Update

There has been some continued discussion over at the JREF Forum regarding the recent Griffin-Balsamo claim that Airfones had been turned off on flight 77. First Apathoid, who works as an airline mechanice= for another company, posts an example from one of his manuals which runs on the same software. While it is not conclusive, it points to the fact that there were two different version dates on the original document, as suspicious.

Secondly, going to the source, Ron Wieck contacts the Corporate Communications office at American, and gets this response:

Ron, engineers at our primary Maintenance & Engineering base in Tulsa tell me that they cannot find any record that the 757 aircraft flown into the Pentagon on 9/11 had had its seatback phones deactivated by that date. An Engineering Change Order to deactivate the seatback phone system on the 757 fleet had been issued by that time.

And then this:

Cell phones may or may not work on aircraft, just as they may or may not work on the ground. It depends whether or not the caller is in range of a tower or satellite. I believe the seatback phones worked by having the signal picked up by land based towers as the aircraft moved across the country.

We do not allow use of cell phones in flight because they can potentially interfere with the cockpit’s navigational and other avionics equipment and thus become a safety issue.

It is our contention that the seatback phones on Flight 77 were working because there is no entry in that aircraft’s records to indicate when the phones were disconnected.