Depends on the phone, I think, and whether the GPS receiver can be kept on by itself.
I’m on a plane right now and GPS works fine. Phones I had a few years ago behaved differently.
GPS on your phone is receive-only anyway. It doesn’t transmit anything but shutting down the receiver can maybe save some bit of power. But I think airplane mode did that on some earlier phones not out of a safety consideration but because some of the chips weren’t modular enough? I’m guessing here.
Also, as a side note, airlines have started adding Starlink to their flights. Alaska includes it for free, and at 50 Mbps, it’s better than many home connections. Fast enough to stream videos and such.
But, of course, Elon is personally hovering over your shoulders and watching every single byte you send.
GPS is a receiver. The satellites broadcast continuously & the phones or other devices just listen to the broadcasts. No reason for airplane mode to turn that off. So it doesn’t.
But …
IME airplanes are very effective blockers of GPS signals. If your on the equator side of the airplane in a window seat maybe GPS will work. But probably not or not often.
In my experience the airplane firewalls are porous. One of the carriers allows Apple’s iMessage through for free, but requires paying for access to the Internet. So on my Android phone I shouldn’t see anything except the inflight media server. Except they seemed to allow connections to the Google service that sends push notifications to Android phones.
I’ll get notifications about the car finishing charging[1], motion from my doorbell, or whatever else. It’s either a devious plan to convince Android users to pay for Internet access to handle their notifications, or lazyness/incompetence in not bothering to block 5228/tcp.
Which makes me wonder, if I setup a VPN running on port 5228, will I be able to connect and get free Internet, or have the airlines restricted connections to just Google addresses.
if I plugged in at the off-airport lot ↩︎
I wonder if maybe that’s needed for RCS, especially now that Apple supports it too? (But not sure if Apple tunnels RCS through iMessage)
Interesting. The Maps app on my iOS devices has never worked in airplane mode. I thought I recalled hearing something long ago about not wanting passengers with ill intentions to have too-precise information about the airplane’s exact location, but that could be a complete hallucination on my part.
Makes as much sense as anything else…
What phone do you have? Claude says earlier phones did have the GPS on the same system-on-chip as the modem, so it couldn’t be left on if the modem was off. But that should’ve stopped circa 2015 or so.
Airline locations are publicly tracked anyway and there are a bunch of websites where you can look them up in near real time without having to rely on passenger GPS.
I can’t speak to the port#, but a few years ago one airline that charged $$ for internet access was completely fooled by a VPN and you had free access.
They later closed that loophole but for a couple years it was great.
50 Mbps? Pffft! This was on an Air New Zealand A320:
So far it’s the only one in the fleet. It’s been trialling Starlink for over a year and, although it’s been very successful, there hasn’t been any move to roll it out to the rest of the fleet. I think there’s an ATR72 running around with it as well.
When I was working we had GPS-equipped IPads.
Even with our large windows with a much better view upwards towards orbit, GPS reception was a little flaky. And worst when flying poleward = North in the northern hemisphere where the bulk of the satellites are above and behind us so not “visible” out the windows.
I just last week had a similar experience on a small ship. Outside on top, GPS was great. Indoors on top near a window? Flaky.
On a lower deck even near a big window? Nada. Zilch. Nothing.
Makes me wish we still had zeppelins and airships. Would be a fun way to work remotely for a month or two.
I wonder how much of that attenuation would be caused by window linings (things like UV/IR shielding, defrosting, or the dimming windows on newer planes)?
Makes me wonder if you could flush a long antenna out the toilet and get some reception that way. Probably should not ask the flight attendant this.
Not necessarily airplanes, but I’ve seen setups that restrict access by only blocking ports 80 and 443 (used to access websites), and others that restrict access by only allowing ports 80 and 443. Both misconfigurations are easily traversed by a VPN. (Nobody tell my kid that it’s trivial to bypass their school’s content blocker with a VPN.)
I can usually get GPS to work by holding my phone towards the window. I have much better luck when I know the person in the window seat. Anyway, yeah, it often works, but not always. Google maps is much happier about it if I’ve pre-downloaded the map tiles for the flight route.
It’d be mildly amusing to play Microsoft Flight Simulator on a real flight, synced to its actual route and current location so that when you look out the window in the game, it looks the same as IRL. And then, just to scare the passenger next to you, spawn in a few Russian fighters right behind…
The toilets always go to a holding tank. On many airplanes the sinks drain directly overboard. Just sayin’ 
Cruise ships do that too. With much better food.
For science!!
And as backup, if the GPS still doesn’t work, you’ll know where I am once I get arrested upon landing.
I don’t upgrade my devices all that frequently. My current ones are pretty new (2-3 years old max). I probably stopped trying the map because I assumed it still wouldn’t work.
If what I half-remember reading happened at all, it was probably before such websites became popular and well-known.
Good point - I don’t know I wasn’t snooping.
I routinely use GPS on flights to track the plane’s progress. I always sit in a window seat and often have to hold my phone up to the window to get a GPS signal, and it takes longer than usual to connect to the necessary number of satellites, but I don’t think I’ve ever been literally unable to get a GPS connection at all.