[vidarh]

Shared screens was the norm in Europe too, but pneumatic headphones is something I've never seen on a European carrier at all - not at all ruling out some might use them, after all, there are many of them and I've by no means flown them all. I wonder, though if it's another case of tech that may have been skipped by airlines that e.g. didn't add inflight entertainment as early as others and so got to "skip ahead" a generation. Most of the European airlines I'd have flown with while younger would have predominantly flown short-haul flight where inflight entertainment might have not been a priority until fairly recently.

[jerlam]

I haven't seen a inflight entertainment console in a few years of flying. There's a trend for some carriers in the US to remove them since most passengers would rather use their own tablet, phone, or laptop with much higher quality; and the carrier can sell them wifi.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2019/10/13...

[littlecranky67]

I've recently been on a plane which had some kind of small phone/tablet mount on the back of the headrests so that you could actually pull it down and put your phone/tablet on it to watch a movie. Great UX, because everybody is on their own devices all the time anyway.

[unscaled]

I've also don't remember seeing them in Europe when flying as a child during the 1990s. Yes, there were shared CRTs every 10-15 rows or so, but the earphones were your run-of-the-mill electric earphones, usually with a two prong connector.

I have to add these were all international flights (this was mostly pre-Schengen, and in any case I don't believe I've taken a flight between Schengen Area countries until 2023), so I'm not sure if shorter distance flights would have been different. The mid-distance flights (> 2.5 hours) I've taken would generally have in-flight entertainment if it wasn't a budget option. Some of the cheaper flights had no screens (or maybe they had ones, but didn't want to pay for the movie) and still had earphones slots connect to a set of inflight radio stations (that were also available when there was a movie being played, as an alternative).

So yes, it was an arguably "superior" experience with selectable audio, volume buttons and rather crappy drivers directly inside the earphones.

[rob74]

I guess the airlines went with whatever was cheaper? For a while, pneumatic headphones (in a system with 100+ headphones) probably were cheaper overall than electronic ones, but with the constant decrease of electronics prices, by the 1990s they probably were only still there for legacy reasons...

[t0mas88]

Same experience here, never seen a "tube" type headphone on any European airline, but several carriers used weird headphone plugs so they could still sell you headphones.