The airline industry began using teletypewriter technology in the early 1920s utilizing radio stations located at 10 airfields in the United States.
It was during this period that the first federal teletypewriter system was introduced in the United States to allow weather and flight information to be exchanged between air traffic facilities.
As a result, the Aeronautical Fixed Telecommunication Network (AFTN) was implemented worldwide as a means of relaying the air traffic communications, sometimes through the use of radioteletype which had become common among military forces in the 1940s.
[5] Since 2010 there have been initiatives in the industry to tackle the high cost of the existing Type B network by deploying secured peer-to-peer solutions, e.g. EDIfly, developed by Innovative Software SARL in Luxembourg and used by companies like Cargolux, TAP, AirBridgeCargo, Garuda Indonesia, China Airlines, Air Asia, HACTL, Swissport etc.
Such solutions allow users to exchange unrestricted amounts of Type B data over the public internet while maintaining all existing addressing schemes and message identification.