Did AirFone ever make money?
Not according to the authors of The 4 A's of Marketing 1


  Despite impressive technological achievements and great expectations all around, the service’s business performance ultimately proved an abject failure. In the ten years before Verizon finally pulled the plug, Airfone generated only 50 million total calls, a fraction of the calls carried daily by cellular companies. While the Airfone service was heavily used when bad weather caused significant delays, the system’s utilization at other times was extremely low. A typical plane was equipped with as many as 60 phones. From these, the average large jet generated fewer than 100 calls per day in about 16 hours of flying time. As a result, the expensive system, with its heavy load of fixed costs, remained idle well over 99% of the time. 
  
  ...
  
  While Airfone claimed that some customers’ monthly bills topped out
  at $4,000, there were not nearly enough of them to sustain the service’s sky-high fixed
  costs. 
  
  ...
  
  Within a few years of the service’s launch, airlines started to remove the expensive phone
  infrastructure from their cabins, since the Airfone cost them more in increased fuel
  consumption (because of the system’s weight) than it generated revenues through their
  revenue sharing arrangement with Verizon. 


My emphasis.