An American Airlines flight attendant announced a new federal law this on Monday on board a trip from Charlotte to Des Moines – claiming they’re being required to vigorously enforce cell phones in airplane mode while onboard the aircraft.
[The crewmember] made a big deal, with multiple announcements and pointedly looking at everyone’s electronics to make sure they were in Airplane Mode. He said as of Wednesday/today it will be a new Federal law, that airplane mode will be mandatory from door closed to landed and on taxiway and that they are being required to enforce it.
There is no new federal law. However, you’re still supposed to keep your cell phone in airplane mode once the door closes on departure and until you land. But there’s no good, scientific reason for the rule.
To be clear, if you ignore crew instructions you may get kicked off of a flight. But nothing bad will happen if you leave your cell phone signal on. Passengers do it every day, both intentionally and because they forget to turn it off. In fact, it’s even time to lift the ban on inflight calling.
Airplane mode is more of a common courtesy our government imposes on us than a safety precaution. The U.S. government won’t let you make phone calls inflight because it’s unpopular with passengers, and politicians don’t like to do unpopular things. There’s no safety reason for it.
- Two decade old pico cells can prevent phone signals from interfering with a plane’s communications. And it’s not clear that interference ever actually happened in any case. The FAA didn’t find any instances of it.
- The FCC originally banned use of cell phones inflight 33 years ago based on (mostly hypothetical) risk of interference with ground networks but technology in place for decades makes that a non-issue today.
Airline unions, especially flight attendant unions, lobby against allowing calling inflight. But the parade of horribles said to follow is not credible.
- Cell phones can be used on planes under European rules. And many airlines around the world provide for wifi-based calling. Hijinks do not ensue.
- Amtrak lets people use cell phones with passengers confined closely together. Again, few meltdowns even though few passengers wear noise-cancelling headphones.
- People talk to each other on planes now and those around them hear it!
- You can make inflight wifi calls on JSX and that seems to go just fine.
There’s no good reason to think we’d have melees in the sky if the federal government dropped its ban on inflight calls on commercial airlines. Since there’s no demonstrable safety reason for it, policies should be up to the airlines who have generally said that if the government allowed inflight calling, they would adopt policies against it.
However I’d make the affirmative case for allowing inflight calling, not just lifting the ban. It used to be available via services like Airfone (which was acquired by Gogo and capacity redirected to internet services over a decade ago).
Conversations can be truly important. Dozens of final phone calls were placed from the four planes hijacked on 9/11, to family and to emergency personnel. I guess rules against it didn’t matter at that point, since administrative punishment was rather beside the point. This Southwest Airlines passenger who might have been able to stop a suicide if she could have used her phone inflight.
Airlines used to have non-smoking sections on planes, Amtrak has quiet cars, surely we can figure out how to shift from inflight calling being illegal to at the discretion of airlines whether to allow it. Just be careful of roaming charges if you leave your phone on while flying internationally.
If you consider that the FAA rules regarding cell phone use are “rules for thee but not for me”, then please read Capt Tom Carlson’s last sentence above.
For the love of God, please no! The train comparison doesn’t hold water because you can move to another car, often go to another seat that is open or just move around. How long are you allowed to stand in an airplane aisle 20 rows from your assigned seat with your crotch in somebody’s face? Most flights I’ve been on are packed so you’re stuck in that seat and that’s it.
As far as your other statement saying that people talking on a plane won’t cause mayhem?
Have you seen how much bull$#@t sitting on a plane JUST wearing a mask caused? Did you predict that? Now just add in gate lice and people intentionally trying to take your better seat. What other shi$#y behavior can we dump into one activity? Let’s see–make bare feet on your armrest mandatory, bathing within 1 week of flying illegal, and free ESA animals provided to anyone who wants one upon boarding?
These are all extraordinarily bad ideas and would make an already mediocre experience, at best, a true dumpster dive.
“it’s even time to lift the ban on inflight calling” is the worst sentence I’ve ever read.
Its not so much a flight safety issue, it’s a technical issue with the cell network. If everyone started using their phones in-flight on the regular, cellular networks would rapidly be overwhelmed because your phone can see far too many towers. The tower handoffs are not designed to operate at the scale of air travel.
Also, it really drains your phone battery anyway because of the poor reception and constant tower handoffs. It’s just a bad idea to do it unless it’s an emergency.
I had an annoying attendant insist I put the window shade down in the middle of the night flying to Europe while I was watching auroras out the left window. Because regulations. I have no idea what difference it made to her but she was adamant.
It might work in Europe or Asia, but Eurooeans and Asians are VERY different from Americans. I was once stuck on a landed US flight that took about 45 minutes waiting for a gate. Several pax and I were “treated” to the vapid meanderings of a 20-something year old ditz, babbling on and on, endlessly. In an environment of ever-increasing incidents of air rage, adding phone conversations is the LAST thing pax or flight attendants need.
The examples in this article are so poorly informed. Are we certain that the phone signals will cause a disruption? No. The key is that when it comes to aviation safety the rule of thumb is to not do something until we are certain it is safe. The same is true with the filters the article mentioned: they haven’t been fully tested to the level needed for avionics so they aren’t approved for airplanes yet.
The concern is that in the US the frequency used for cell phones and for the automated altitude indicator in airplanes are next to each other, and if autopilot is on (as required for some approaches, especially in low visibility) momentary interference from a cell signal could confuse the plane and make it think it is at a different altitude causing it to slam into the runway (see the recent Delta landing for why that’s bad).
The issue doesn’t apply in Europe because they use different frequencies. It isn’t an issue on Amtrak because, well, it’s a train not an airplane and doesn’t have an altitude indicator. It also isn’t an issue on JAX because they’re using starlink which is running on a different frequency. It didn’t matter on 9/11 because unfortunately making a safe landing was no longer happening anyway, so possibly disrupting a safe landing kind of no longer mattered.
Is it really an issue? We don’t really know, but it’s that uncertainty that keeps the rule in place.
On the other hand, if you absolutely have to make that phone call side by side with your fellow sardines on the airplane, most airlines seem to be doing similar to JAX, so you’ll probably be able to make calls using inflight wifi on all the major airlines soon enough.
Around 1998 I was given a work mobile phone whilst I was working on deployment with the RAF, during a test flight and as we were taxiing the phone received a call….now the intercom was an old analogue one…the crew could not hear each other whilst I was trying to turn the device off. You could hear the incoming call signal interfering with the intercome before the ringer sounded. So I can imagine the concern for analogue intercoms but not modern systems.
Quiet cars, not “quiet cares.”
Cell phones on a plane is a disastrous thought.