It’s not. Hence the conspiracy thing. The pain with cellphones in planes is that they can see the tower, but the tower can’t see them. So they punch the transmission power to 100%. Worse still, they can see not one but probably several dozen towers at the same time, trying to reach them all in hopes one of them can hear them.
Now multiply that by 80 to 200 phones on a plane. This will not interfere with electronic guidance systems or computers in the plane, but will also never actually last for long enough on a cell to establish a connection, but all the requests will busy the tower. So cell towers get briefly radio jammed as the plane flies over them.
And that was/is possible at that height?
It’s not. Hence the conspiracy thing. The pain with cellphones in planes is that they can see the tower, but the tower can’t see them. So they punch the transmission power to 100%. Worse still, they can see not one but probably several dozen towers at the same time, trying to reach them all in hopes one of them can hear them.
Now multiply that by 80 to 200 phones on a plane. This will not interfere with electronic guidance systems or computers in the plane, but will also never actually last for long enough on a cell to establish a connection, but all the requests will busy the tower. So cell towers get briefly radio jammed as the plane flies over them.