eli5: Why do most airlines still use 2-pin audio jacks for the in-flight entertainment systems on their planes?
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Corporations tend to act on a “ain’t broke, don’t fix” or ABDF policy, meaning if you don’t need to replace it, then don’t. This was not thought up by engineers, but by the accountants. When you take an airplane out of service to change something that isn’t mission critical, in this case something that doesn’t help a plane full of live humans take off, fly, and land with everyone safe and intact, then it’s unjustifiably expensive, much cheaper to use those mass produced yet proprietary headphones. Besides, people tend to have their phones, tablets, and computers with them on flights and their own headphones, so it wouldn’t make much sense to change the in-flight entertainment system, you can do that when you retire those old planes and buy new ones.
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They used to have “air tubes”. You plugged in a two pin plug that was just a hollow tube. No electronics. This would connect to bigger tubes below the seat. The sound would be sent through the tube. They actually had a few different channels. The sound was OK but the best part was all of the second hand smoke. The 70’s were fun.
Just try to modernize some electronics in an airplane, and you will learn how much pain certification and bureaucracy can cause.
I’d disagree that most airline flights still have 2-pin audio jacks, as most aircraft have seats that have been upgraded to 1-pin stereo audio jacks. The 2-pin audio jacks were an upgrade from the two-hole jacks passengers attached sound tube headphones into.
https://apex.aero/articles/sound-tube-surprising-history-airline-headsets/
The flights I’ve been on in the past years don’t even have those systems and instead they expect you to do everything on your mobile device.
Most people are using their personal devices for entertainment these days. And most of these devices use Bluetooth or USB-C now anyway.
So why go through the expense of updating the old planes and headphones? They chose 2pin early on, so that became the standard.
Most planes have a 30ish year service life. So the older planes now are from the early 90s or so. So you should be starting to see more 3.5mm, as it was pretty well established as a standard for personal music players by then. The walkman had long since used it, for example.
But updating electronics for planes is expensive and time consuming due to regulations. So there will be some lag in terms of newer planes rolling out with it. And you’re probably flying more older planes than newer ones, in general.
it was the standard at some point.
It costs money to replace them.
but now most planes have a 3.5mm jack in the entertainment system
It is expensive and probably a lot of red tape to update a plane. Smoking hasn’t been allowed on planes for 30 years and yet a lot of them still have ash trays.
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