Goodbye, Quiet Air

An airline flight has long been a blessing to the harried--a quiet interlude aloft, away from the ringing of the telephone.

Goodbye to all that. By early summer, complete air-ground telephone service is expected to be available to airlines on routes east of the Mississippi and north of Virginia; and within three years, pending FCC approval, 72 transmission stations across the nation should make in-flight telephoning commonplace on U.S. flights.

Last week the Bell System began construction of five ground antenna stations in New York, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana and Massachusetts. Similar stations are already operating on an experimental basis in five cities. Calls from the ground are made by dialing the phone company, asking for the "aviation operator" in the area over which the plane is flying. Passengers in the air simply reverse the process ; the nearest base-station aviation operator can put them in touch with any phone in the country.

Tricky and expensive as the process seems, the cost of calls is enticing. A passenger in a plane over Manhattan will be able to call San Francisco for $4 for the first three minutes, and a Yonkers housewife will be able to speak to her husband thousands of feet above Idlewild for only $1.50.

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