So far every comment here is talking about safety of flight, which is not the issue.
It's not about safety.
The FAA didn't make this rule. The FCC did, because the cell networks weren't designed for thousands of airborne handsets moving at 500 knots. "Cell phone systems depend on frequency reuse, which allows for a dramatic increase in the number of customers that can be served within a geographic area on a limited amount of radio spectrum, and operating a phone at an altitude may violate the fundamental assumptions that allow channel reuse to work."
And this makes it risky for airlines to allow because how can the operator determine that every different electronic device will not cause interference?
I've flown small planes where my phone absolutely did cause a burst of noticeable radio interference every few seconds with LTE enabled, but those avionics likely have much less shielding than the commercial planes. Simple fix is to just turn on airplane mode or disable LTE.
If there was a risk to the aircraft, do you think that safety point would be left to the passenger to turn off the device? Of course not so if there was any risk at all of them being used they would not have been allowed on the aircraft.
Agreed, I'm not claiming there is any real safety risk.
The issue is that FAA rule requires the operator to determine that any allowed electronic device does not cause interference. It clearly places the burden of proof on the airline operator, that's a pretty high bar by some interpretations.
The airline has a several million dollars/euro worth aircraft to lose in case of a crash.
The insurance has many more millions to pay.
If I were them and if I suspected that having phones or smartphones switched on and/or used during flight might in 0.00001% of cases cause a crash, my policy would be to frisk all passengers and take all their electronic devices in custody before boarding.
Since this is not done, they (airline and insurance) must be pretty sure that the devices (and their use) are not dangerous for flight safety.
Say we expect a fatal accident to cost an airline $1 billion in lost equipment, training, loss of business, etc. The average cost of leaving cellphones on per flight is 0.0000001*$1,000,000,000 or $100. Frisking passengers and taking their phones costs more than $100 per flight, so airlines wouldn't do it.
Don't forget the lost business because you will force business travelers to check bags. Literally everyone would have to check a bag, so you can't charge extra for it. And, no mobile boarding passes. And no move to bring-your-own-screen entertainment.
That's the government. Their goal is to convince you that the government is doing something to make you safe. To accomplish that, they run big, obvious security screenings. The airlines, left to their own devices, wouldn't bother.
(I'm a CFI.) 91.21 is irrelevant. The FCC specifically forbids the use of cell phones aboard aircraft, and the FAA doesn't have the power to overrule the FCC in matters of radio interference. The FAA has no rule, and cannot make a rule, that in any way allows the operation of cell phones aboard aircraft as long as the FCC forbids it.
I'd say, at this point, it's not about FCC rules either.
The planes are already filled to the max with humans like cans of sardines.
And it seems like most of these humans are perfectly OK with giving up their right to yap on the phone if that means their neighbor will lose it too.
"WE NOW ENCOURAGE INFLIGHT PHONE CONVERSATIONS!" is not a message the airlines would want to send.
It's a tricky balance. Everyone knows the rule is not enforced, but your seat neighbor can tell on you (especially if you're annoying), so people are incentivized to behave. Not so much on trains, btw.
(Also, FWIW the FAA rule leaves it to airlines to decide when and whether to apply it).
The FAA rule you're referring to, 14 CFR 91.21, has no relation to the FCC rule. The FAA cannot authorize the use of cell phones aboard aircraft as long as the FCC forbids it. It's not the FAA's jurisdiction.
During those phases, if an emergency occurs, people should not have their heads in a screen. The configuration of all seats and trays should be that if an incident occurs everyone is prepped to evacuate ASAP. The fewer distractions there are the better IMHO.
For what it's worth, flying small aircraft at 5k feet AGL I've found cell reception to be amazingly spotty, even over relatively urban areas. I'm not sure that passengers asking for cell phone use on commercial flights are going to be happy with the result.
I'm not sure what the big driver here - being in a metal-skinned aircraft doesn't help of course, but I also get the impression that even a Skyhawk moves fast enough that tower registration becomes iffy. There's a lot of my phone and iPad showing service appearing/disappearing at random. Sometimes I'll call the ATIS on my phone to get it before I round a mountain and it often takes multiple tries to get that call to connect, and then of course sometimes it drops right before I get the altimeter setting or something else I cared about.
I heard from a cell service technician that most cell towers antennas are not really designed to radiate upwards. This kind of makes sense when you think about it, radiating up would be wasted energy.
This was in the context of asking why service/signal was so bad on top of a hill. I was thinking it would have been better because of clear LoS but that only makes sense if you assume an onmidirectional pattern.
More info here: “It has a flat fan-shaped radiation pattern, which is tilted slightly down to cover the cell area without radiating at higher angles into further off cells which reuse the same frequencies. The elevation angle of the antenna must be carefully adjusted, so the beam covers the entire cell without radiating too far.”
Cellphone service at light aircraft altitudes has gotten progressive worse over the last decades. It is because of the increased number / decreased size of cells. To prevent cross-talk between antennas, cells are more tightly focused. Less of the antennas point up enough for aircraft. If you do get reception it is probably from a more distant tower, one far enough away that you are low enough for its antennas to be pointing at you.
Fun fact: many pilots actively use ipads, phones, and bluetooth headsets in the cockpit with all the radios on throughout the flight. Wifi too. Turning the ipads in the cockpit off or in airplane mode is not on any checklist of any plane. Better still they actually get mounted on or near the yoke so the pilot can look at it and use it while they are flying.
They are an indispensable tool for situational awareness, navigation, and even as backup instruments (though non certified of course). Pilots will even bring them to exams and instructors and examiners are not against that and they are about as normal as paper maps used to be. Modern navigation equipment (e.g. the Garmin's G1000) also can pair with an ipad and accept input from it or sync with it. A phone is a great thing to have when the tower isn't responding because the person is taking a break, or it's after hours, or you have some kind of radio failure. You can talk to flight control over a phone from inside the cockpit of a plane to get your clearance too. It's not illegal or frowned upon.
This includes many airliners btw. And the FAA has long approved using ipads and many commercial airlines use them routinely. So, bluetooth and wifi are both used in cockpits. Any modern airliner is completely resilient against that and would have been hardened a long time ago. Any equipment at all sensitive to radio frequencies used by consumer equipment would have a hard time getting certified at this point.
So, the obsession with the little pocket radios (phones, kindles, etc.) that airlines have is kind of silly at this point. Especially since it's limited to takeoffs and landings on most flights and nobody actively checks any of this other than to police people to remove their head sets randomly (about 1 in 5 times I get told off). Stewardesses using equipment to detect the 50% of the passengers that don't bother with or forget about turning their radios off is not and has never been a thing. That's because it's a complete waste of time and it doesn't matter one bit from a safety point of view. If that wasn't the case, there would be hefty fines on this. There aren't.
A valid reason to turn devices into flight safe mode anyway is simply to save a bit of battery. Phones will eat up a lot of battery trying to reach base stations that aren't there or that are passing by to quickly to keep up with.
That being said, some airlines offer 4G connectivity in flight. Obviously, you'd have to turn your phone radio on to make use of that. With 5G and things like space link, I imagine in flight connectivity is only going to become only more common.
> A valid reason to turn devices into flight safe mode anyway is simply to save a bit of battery.
A better reason is when "roaming abroad", I've already seen (too late) my phone connecting to some third-party country tower and even using some data. And the few Kbs have been very expensive ...
Years ago I left my phone 'on' when I traveled to Russia. I wasn't going to call anyone from that phone, but left it 'on' for wifi at the place I was staying at.
1:30 am I got a call... I woke up and answered it and heard a client say "oh, sorry, I forgot you're overseas... bye!" click. That 6 second call was $5.50 (noticed on the bill the next month). I told the client later that they may as well have let me say hello and use up the other 50+ seconds of the time we'd already burned...
That's been my view this whole time. Bottle of water from a store just outside? Let's confiscate it. You got 100 phones all powered on? No problem! Just please turn them off thanks!
So, I suppose if TSA let people bring in a bottle of "water" from a store just outside, this could easily be faked where you bring in a couple of bottles of bleach and ammonia (although, I don't know how those chemicals would do with the plastic from some water bottles).
It kind of makes sense to take a hard-line on water bottles, even if they're sealed, even if it matches the kind of water they're selling just behind you at the airport, and even if you have a receipt, because all of those things are trivial to surmount.
Given how often I see people in public (stores, elevators, restaurants) using their phones on either speakerphone or having video calls, allowing this on airplanes seems destined to make an already awful experience (at least for those of us in the cheap seats) even worse.
Personally, I don’t fly that often, and I like being forced to be disconnected for a few hours. If I’m flying for business, that’s often some of my most productive time.
I have heard that the reason to have the "airplane mode" rule on takeoff and landing is now mainly for passenger attention to safety instruction and situational awareness at the points of the flight most likely to have an emergency. Apocryphal or not??
A passenger not hearing the flight attendants' instructions because they have loud music blaring into their ears is surely a concern. Also, in the event of impact, the devices become projectiles that can injure others.
Cellular connectivity isn’t even necessary these days with Wi-Fi calling. Planes are already equipped with access points. The only improvement I can think of is to have some means to tell the phone “you’re on a plane” so it doesn’t keep trying to find a base station to roam to. Since there’s only so many gateways for aircraft traffic, it’s possible the core could recognize it and inform the phone accordingly.
At least with Verizon Wi-Fi Calling on Delta via GoGo, your phone will ring but if you answer the call it won't actually connect. They're doing something to block it.
I would imagine that the stray RF at the altitudes at which commercial aircraft fly already poses enough of an interference threat. Given that, those systems are likely already designed with enough RF shielding or other safeguards. Since the RF power emitted by consumer mobile phones is so low, it shouldn’t pose much greater of a threat than the RF the aircraft are already designed to handle.
* That assumes a device that both meets specifications and isn't damaged (overwhelmingly true, but not universally true)
* Most of these airplanes were designed well before modern cell phones existed. I'd be less worried about highly mechanical systems from the 60s/70s, more worried about electronic systems from the 90s, and less worried about some of the most modern aircraft.
As an electrical and aerospace engineer this is something I get asked frequently. tl;dr it's very unlikely to cause an issue, but be a decent person and put your phone in airplane mode during a flight.
First safety. A properly functioning mobile phone from a reputable manufacturer is not likely to interfere with any digital aircraft systems. But that assumes:
* The phone is operating within specs and not damaged
* The aircraft shielding is fully intact and there are no other issues
It's only a matter of time before this causes some sort of issue. Like the Wikipedia article links to, it already probably has caused minor issues. Also, many important systems are analog (like pilot voice comms). I was on a plane that was forced to do a go around at landing because the pilots couldn't hear the control tower due to interference. I wouldn't be surprised one bit if it was someone's phone.
Second, basic decision making in a society. You're trading an extremely low likelihood of putting 200 people in danger or at great inconvenience against.... being able to make a call 6 minutes sooner? Checking your email? To tell someone... what - your plane is arriving? That's all online. Wait 10 minutes.
The number of people with no expertise in electrical engineering and electromagnetic interference who "heard on Reddit/YouTube/from a friend" that it's actually safe to use a phone on a plane and decide to do it is way too high. It's the same thought process as hearing something on Youtube about mRNA causing cancer/magnetism and then ignoring the medical community and skipping a vaccine.
An overwhelming majority of the time, using a cell phone on a plane doesn't matter. But don't do it. Put it in airplane mode. There's not a big conspiracy trying to make you miserable. Experts on this are actually worried about you.
I suspect most people don't even put their phones on aeroplane mode. And nothing bad happens. This is just a rule to enforce and maintain authority over the passengers.
I see no problem with letting mobile phones be used for entertainment with headphones, even during take off. The flight safety information is practically the same as law.
First, some people seem to talk quite loudly into their phone. Dunno the ratio, 1 out of 20 or 40?
The second is, if you are sitting beside someone, and they talk to you, your attention is of course focused on them. It doesn't matter that the person beside you is talking, because your attention is focused there on purpose. Yet, if a person beside you is talking on a phone, like right beside you, it is hard to ignore.
Now imagine people on both sides, and behind you and in front of you talking. Some loudly.
On a plane, usually there are not that many people contantly talking.
So now you've stuck in a tiny seat, for hours and hours, with all these people talking, loudly, constantly.
Worse, it's all gibberish, all only one side of a conversation. Basically people just spewing random sentences.
One requires 2 people in person to engage, and is usually projected in a general direction which limits sounds. The other, only 1 person has to be present and sound may go in any direction.
Alternatively, an irl conversation has two talkers which doubles noise, has to be louder than someone on a phone because you're taking to a receiver further away, and both conversers have to be directing sound in the direction of where people are, as opposed to a phone which can be used while directing sound at e.g. the wall
This horse has been beaten dead over and over. Captain Joe and other airline pilots admitted that it's all about the airlines controlling passengers' attention through deception, and has nothing to do with safety.
At cruise altitude, mobile devices are too far away from towers to operate, so only ground and takeoff/landing ops would be usable externally. It would be more efficient to have femtocells for major carriers onboard relayed to ground stations.
It's not about safety.
The FAA didn't make this rule. The FCC did, because the cell networks weren't designed for thousands of airborne handsets moving at 500 knots. "Cell phone systems depend on frequency reuse, which allows for a dramatic increase in the number of customers that can be served within a geographic area on a limited amount of radio spectrum, and operating a phone at an altitude may violate the fundamental assumptions that allow channel reuse to work."