A GROUND-TO-AIR TELEPHONE CALLING SYSTEM AND RELATED METHOD

摘要

A ground-to-air telephone calling system is provided including a computer (22) for receiving an airborne telephone number and a call-back number from a calling party (20) and forming the telephone numbers into a data signal comporting with existing protocol filed in the FCC, an uplink unit (24) for uplinking the data signal to a satellite (26) and a plurality of downlink stations (28) for receiving the data signal from the satellite; a plurality of ground stations (30) corresponding to each of the downlink units for receiving the data signals and passing a call signal identifying the airborne telephone and particular ground station to a corresponding transmit/receive unit (32) for subsequent transmission to the aircraft; a call being initiated from the ground station to the calling party over the public switched telephone network if the aircraft responds to the call signal.