Skymall and the Electronic Listening Device

I posted this on facebook, but thought it was worth repeating.

Before class started tonight, a couple of us were discussing how difficult it is to hear our organizational behavior professor from our assigned seats (she seated us with our teams and my team is on the back row) and a gadget I'd seen in Skymall magazine on a flight came to mind.

http://www.skymall.com/shopping/detail.htm?pid=69668336&c=10210

I love the description.

"HEAR" and "SEE" a conversation from a football field away.
Powerful enough to capture distant sounds from 300 feet away. Zoom in and see what you're hearing. Sounds and images impossible for the human ears and eyes to pick up now seem as if you're only a couple of feet away. This secret surveillance device is perfect for when you really need to know what's going on!

The real question is "Who buys this?" There is no way that an item that wasn't selling would make it into the catalog that is in the seatback pocket of EVERY seat in the U.S. commercial airline fleet.

It is currently 10:11pm Pacific on a Monday night. According to Flightaware.com from looking at the top 32 carriers by aircraft in the sky, and then deleting the cargo lines and the foreign carriers, there are 14 airlines for a total of 603 aircraft. Assuming an average seat count of 200, which is likely low since a lot of the airplanes flying right now are headed cross-country or overseas, that is 120,600 of those catalogs in the air right now. In short, there is no way that they are wasting advertising space on a non-performing item in a catalog with that kind of circulation.

Enough of this, but if you know someone that bought this device from skymall, especially if they used the airphone in the seatback in front of them to order it in-flight, let me know.