Or, more likely, “We’re getting noise in our headsets; there was a lady making a cell phone call. Must have been her.”
I’ll fess up. I put it in airplane mode, but I never bother turning it off during take off or landing, just stick it in my pocket.
I’ve heard this cited as a reason for the ban - specifically, the already low chance that people pay much attention to the safety briefing would decline to near zero, and if a problem happens during takeoff or landing (the most likely times) it would be nice not to have 70% of your passengers distracted by their electronic gizmos.
I’m definitely in the camp that believes that if there were sound evidence of a real hazard, it would be stunningly irresponsible to deal with this by asking for voluntary compliance.
I’ve been on six flights in the last two months, different airlines, and the flight attendants announced that phones must be turned off, that flight mode doesn’t count, so I turned mine off.
and then to confuse everyone…
In flight internet service!
http://www.delta.com/content/www/en_US/traveling-with-us/in-flight-services/products/technology.html
I fly about once a month and I never turn my phone off. I know two (physicist/) aerospace engineers from the TU Delft who say it’s a nonsensical rule not based on evidence. They don’t turn their phones off either. That’s enough for me.
All the objective testing I’ve done 
in my car points to the conclusion that while a cellphone/gsm doesn’t cause any equipment to really malfunction, it occurs quite often that phones interfere with audio equipment. Presumably also the headsets of pilot and crew.
I can imagine that if all passengers left their phones on the chance of serious interference with the pa-system, the onboard intercom or the radio would be about 100%.
One active phone: meh.
300 phones: mayhem.
It depends on the distance between the phone and the audio equipment, though.
I know! Let’s make first class turn their phones off (since they’re closer to the pilots’ headsets,) but allow [del]steerage[/del] economy flyers to keep their phones on! 
Ah…I see. Post hoc ergo propter hoc, even when it is absolutely not reproducible.
Once the airlines got an idea in their punkin heads that cellphones “in rare instances” might cause problems, some of them never got it out of their heads.
But I think the real cause of all those malfunctions is a malfunctioning pacemaker on board, and I feel they should go investigate that first.
Ditto when I flew from Newark to Stockholm via London a couple of weeks ago.
So true. It’s bad enough taking the underground.
More likely the FAA and CAA are very taken with the phrase ‘better safe than sorry’.
Based on the way airlines generally treat their passengers my personal view is that they themselves really don’t give a monkeys and would be delighted to trim the rule announcements and enforcement from their staff rostering and immediately fire 1/5000th of their cabin crew.
I doubt there’s been a single commercial flight within the past 10 years that did not have at least one cell phone on during takeoff/landing and yet, surprise, nothing has happened.
If cell phones were actually any kind of danger, they’d force you to check them.
Wrap your cell phone in aluminum foil and this will shield transmissions from it.
That day may be coming sooner than you think.
FCC Urges FAA to Allow Gadgets During Airline Takeoff and Landing
I have a cell phone and a blackberry and never turn off either one on flights. The first few times were by mistake. Since then, I just can’t be bothered. I stash the mobile devices in my bag on the way through security, and that’s usually where they stay until I deplane. The one thing I have learned is to turn the data feed on the blackberry to “off when roaming”. Otherwise your bill tends to skew to the high side by the time you land in another country! I’m with the other skeptics in the thread – if cell phones were an actual danger to the plane, they wouldn’t be allowed on board.
aesop – who has been on 500+ flights since the year 2000
You guys are all overlooking something rather important in this whole process: certification.
All equipment onboard an airplane is certified either on the Type Certificate or on Supplemental TCs. In other words, there is engineering and paperwork to support the entire design, including wiring harnesses, communications and avionics systems, etc. These things take a long time to certify, and the fact of the matter is that the vast majority of planes you might encounter hit their design freezes long before the iPhone was invented, and in some cases even before the first cell phone hit the market.
The laws of physics being what they are, electromagnetic interference is a real phenomenon, and it is considered for every device on board an aircraft. You can shield against it, or rearrange components to prevent it when you design, but how on earth do any of you expect Boeing to have thought of your laptop back when they came up with the first designs for the 737? I can assure you, even with updates, large parts of the planes leaving the factories today are per designs set on paper 30 or 40 years ago. I can say this because this is true of the planes I work on - I regularly pull out engineering drawings that are older than I am (I’m 31) that define some part of the wiring, structure or functioning of the aircraft.
So, basically, you’re all clammoring for certification of technology that was not forseen and that even if we worked exclusively on determining whether or not iPhones affected comm systems on the CRJ1000, we’d still be looking at aa couple of years worth of work, for each and every generation of the phone, not to mention the same amount of work for all the Nokias, Samsungs, LGs, HTCs, etc etc etc.
The industry is trying to catch up, but there’s a ton of work to do and it will take time. I’m sorry some passengers feel they can’t be away from their phones for a couple of hours, but it’s really not crucial to the operation of the aircraft. I know for a fact that I’ll commit much more time on the engineering of fixing a jammed trim acuator than I ever will dealing with the bloody printer on a business jet.
It’ll happen (though I really, really hope they ban actual voice calls… I hate listening to loud passengers jabber on) but it might take some reengineering of the planes in order to do it. If shielding is needed or other changes to the aircraft design, that will take time and money to incoroporate (costs likely passed to the passengers, who will bitch about that too, most likely).
Just a couple of weeks ago, I created the engineering for a ground stud. A new avionics component is being offered on a given plane type, but EMI testing showed that the only electrically powered part of it, the back light (it’s a pneumatic component), caused adjacent instruments to flicker and fluctuate. That’s it. Turning the light on caused instrument failures. So a half dozen instruments have to be rewired with shielding if you want this new component. Guess who pays for that? Not the airplane maker, I can assure you.
Sorry, this has turned into a bit of a disjointed rant. It’s just that it’s not easy to say “here’s new technology, let us use it whereever we want!” because that new technology wasn’t considered in the old stuff and bad shit can happen. For the record, from a Risk Assessment perspective, failed communication/avionics systems during take off and landing are (mostly) considered to be either High Risk or Catastrophic, in terms of worst case possible outcome. Even with odds of 10^-9 per fleet flight hour, that is a “must address” issue. Which is why, in the case of cell phones, it is addressed as “ban cell phones” rather than trying to do all the work to qualify the iPhone 1, just in time for Apple’s release of the iPhone 5. It’s very, very hard to keep up.
A former flight attendent friend of my wife’s says that the technology for cell phones changes so fast that the faa can not test all of it to insure that it won’t disrupt communication between the tower and pilots.
Another intresting fact. since 9/11 cockpits are now built like panic rooms and once engaged the doors will not open nor can be opened til after the plane has landed and the piolets have to exit the cockpit out of the window or a tiny hatch.
“Ummmmm Captain I bumped the panic switch” :smack:
Standard equipment right now in my 1979 plane is a box that sits on the dash right above all the avionics and creates a wifi hotspot for my iPad to connect to so I can see all my maps on the iPad in addition to the weather radar. None of that affects my equipment or my ability to talk to the tower.
You know what does? Whenever I get swept by the radar when I’m near an airport with one of the big dishes I get a buzz in my headset and can’t hear the air traffic controller for a second. I find that slightly ironic.
Because shortly thereafter, someone is going to have aboard an illegal cell phone jammer just so they don’t have to hear “the cabin is filled with idiots yapping about their boring lives & businesses …”
At that point will a jammer cause problems for flight communications and flying capabilities?
I fortunately don’t have to fly every other week like I used to do.
But the horror of a plane filled with cellphone users would make me want to buy a set of these: noise cancelling headphones
— from a pretty good blog entry on this subject.
Now, the question would be, are noise-cancelling headphones a ‘personal electronic device’?
What about an insulin pump?
Or a pacemaker?
I get a little irritated when we, the public, are treated as a bunch of idiot cows that are herded from here to there and back as if we were not intelligent enough to understand reason. It smacks of absurd theater to force us all to take off our shoes and belts and be subject to search of all of our person and our belongings just to have the privilege of being shoehorned into a metal cylinder with several dozen other semi-irritable passengers. But imagine the level of ire that would arise if these self-same people were allowed to talk (loudly) on their cellphones throughout the flight.
I imagine an aviary of squawking Myna birds all speaking simultaneously and gradually increasing their volume in response to increasingly irritating background noise.
I fully support a cellphone use ban on planes. If you are on business, your lab or office should know and your calls should be diverted to a message informing incoming callers as to your status. If you are flying for leisure, then checking back home every hour probably isn’t a good idea no matter how much you love the rest of your family that didn’t come with you on holiday (or vacation). If you are fleeing from justice, then maybe you should consider that cell phone traffic is traceable.
But, I am a bit cranky around hundreds of relative strangers, and I imagine many others are.
In other words, YMMV.