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The irony is that Airplane Mode doesn't permit you use your phone on an airplane (at least per US airline policy, despite the FAA indicating that airlines may l
by kevindication 16y ago
The irony is that Airplane Mode doesn't permit you use your phone on an airplane (at least per US airline policy, despite the FAA indicating that airlines may let passengers use phones in airplane mode).
At least it lets you have a conversation without being interrupted.
- martey 16y agoOther than old articles from 2007 and 2008, and a couple of undated anecdotes, I was not able to find any information from any American airline suggesting that phones were prohibited on flights regardless of whether they had an Airplane or Flight mode. What current information I could find about mobile phones generally refer to using them with in-flight wifi, which seems to directly contradict your statement.
- kevindication 16y agoMy experience is flight attendants that don't know the current policy, and assume that all phones have to be off. Maybe I'm just unlucky.
- vyrotek 16y agoWhen I fly Southwest they specifically announce that you are free to use your phone if it has Airplane mode. Good enough for me.
- wrs 16y agoI fly frequently on a few different US airlines, all with the same basic announcement: - All electronic devices must be powered completely off during the first and last 10 minutes of flight. - Laptops and phones can be on during the rest of the flight if all radios are off (including WiFi and Bluetooth). - The growing exception to the above is on planes with WiFi, where you can turn WiFi on during cruise. No other kinds of radios are allowed, even receive-only radios.
- brk 16y agoI use my iPhone, HTC Incredible and 3G iPad (in airplanes modes) all the time on US flights. It's never been an issue. I think that if an inadvertently left-on cell phone could truly disrupt an airplane we'd see MUCH stricter enforcement. Otherwise you're implying a band of terrorists playing Angry Birds in all-radios-on mode stands a significant chance of downing an airliner...
- jellicle 16y agoI would guess the average passenger airplane flight has 50-100 cellphones on throughout the entire flight. If cell phone interference crashed planes, no plane would make it off the ground. I doubt there has been a passenger flight in the last ten years that took off without at least one cell phone operating in the cabin.
- maurycy 16y agohttp://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/aviation/unsafe-at-any-airspeed http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/aviation/unsafe-at-any-ai... tl;dr Cellphones and other electronics are more of a risk than you think
- jellicle 16y agoIf they were, planes would be crashing left and right. They aren't. Who are you going to believe, some engineers writing in a magazine or a massive experiment conducted over a period of 20 years involving every single passenger flight? Tens of millions of flights per year. Cell phones on every single one of them. No crashes due to cell phones. Cell phones do not cause unacceptable interference with airplanes. Q.E.D.
- maurycy 16y agoSafety is operated by statistics, not boolean logic. Things are not either safe or unsafe. It all depends on trade-offs, and what risks we can accept in exchange of other values, such as comfort. The article mentionds, though, two worrying things such as the bias in investigations and ongoing GPS technology usage increase. I would also stress that it _might be not_ linear. Combined risk of few hundrends of turned on cell phones is not a mere multiplication of risk for a single device.