[Off-Topic] Cell Phones and Airplanes

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a few months. The subject finally came up on Twitter:

@AkitaOnRails, if you crash the plane tweeting with that 3G on, you’ll embarrass the whole country! LOL!!!

It was a joke, of course :-) But it was the push I needed to finally write about it: people acting on false premises.

A few months ago, on my way to yet another event, I kept my iPhone on, on purpose, as always. I usually flip on Airplane Mode once we’re in the air to save battery, but before takeoff I was watching a video podcast. Then a lady next to me decided to pick a fight and told me to turn it off. I ignored her. So what did she do? She called a flight attendant. Ugh.

She even blurted out what a lot of people still ignorantly believe: “this ‘gentleman’ is risking my life!” Picture my urge to fire back a “shut the fuck up!”. Of course I didn’t :-)

I figure readers of my blog don’t buy this, but even so, plenty of people may not know why the warning exists in the first place. Just think it through. If a wireless gadget really had even the slightest chance of interfering with the plane’s communications, enough to bring it down, would you, as the airline owner, let anyone board your plane with a cell phone?

It’s the same as letting someone board with a bomb and politely asking: “we kindly ask passengers carrying bombs not to activate them while inside the plane.” Duh. The fact that we can board with electronics is already proof that none of them put the plane at risk. That would be idiotic. If it actually brought planes down, every cell phone would go into the cargo hold in a lead container, the same way sharp objects never make it past security.

So if it does no harm, why does that damn message still play before takeoff and before landing? Now comes a conclusion by induction. What are the two most critical moments of a flight? Takeoff and landing.

Those are exactly the moments the crew wants everyone alert to any emergency announcement. If everyone’s got headphones on, playing video games, typing on a laptop, an emergency message takes forever to reach the whole cabin. The only goal of telling you to shut off your gadgets is to get our attention. Nothing else.

Here’s my conspiracy theory. If they told the truth, “to have your attention in an emergency, we ask you to turn off your devices,” nobody would turn anything off. So they figure it’s better to put collective stupidity to work and say “please turn off your cell phones, video games, mp3 players and computers, and airplane mode isn’t enough.”

In other words, they quietly weaponize the fear of signal interference so that passengers police each other, the way that lady policed me. That builds peer pressure that forces everyone to comply, just to skip the argument.

By the way, if any of this were actually true, I’d never board a plane. Bad actors exist, so why trust that they’d switch theirs off? And I wouldn’t understand anyone working on a plane knowing the passengers are a hazard. Picture that.

So yes, if you believe a cell phone signal can bring down a plane, you’re still stuck in the mental laziness I described in my previous article. If you want more detail, I stumbled on a Mythbusters episode today about exactly this.

Electronic gear does not bring down airplanes. Airlines are cleverly cashing in on the fear that collective ignorance produces. Smart strategy.

Oh, and although this doesn’t exactly count as proof, I’ve tested it on nearly all my flights and kept my iPhone and iPod on the whole time :-P No plane fell out of the sky, obviously. But sure, I always pay attention during takeoff and landing, because I get the principle. The rest is just experimentation.