Won’t kill the plane. Will kill your battery. fast while trying to find and connect to cell towers that are too far away
I don’t think that.
The odds of any phone interfering, interfering with a critical system, interfering with that system at a critical time, and interfering substantially enough to cause a deviation that would be not caught by the crew, and the deviation was significant enough to cause damage…are miniscule.
Turn your phone off to hear the safety briefing.
I just think you’re an asshole who is apparently too good for the rules or request of the flight crew.
Well. At least you read me right.
Theres an old conspiracy theory, pre smart phone, that it was about preventing terrorists using phones as missile guidance. Basically, if you see a cellphone jumping 1 tower to the next, you can tell speed by distance and time between towers’ coverage areas.
They didnt want phones on planes creating constant false positives theyd have to verify against flight logs, etc, and obviously didnt want to give enemies ideas ideas, hence the line about interference, but of interference were a likely hazard, theyd be locking up phones for the flight.
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.
You’re conflating two things. One is GPS, which is designed to stop functioning above 1,000 knots to prevent it from being used in a missile.
The other is the interference of which I spoke having to do with electronics like cellphones that operate at harmonics that overlay frequencies used by aircraft navigation systems. It can be demonstrated that they do indeed interfere, but so many things have to happen to make the interference happen it’s wildly unlikely. So many things have changed over the years that prevent this from happening, like cellphones operate at lower power, personal electronics are better shielded, and operate at lower power. On top of that, the aircraft’s RF and EM shielding would have to be damaged in just the right spot, and the electronic device would have to be right near the damage.
As far as cell towers go, most phones are too weak to make a good connection from all but the lowest altitudes, and you’re moving fast enough that it can’t handshake the next tower and negotiate the connection quick enough to have a good connection except maybe st the slowest speeds and altitude on approach for landing.
I did a minor study on this exact subject, but it’s been decades, so the details are fuzzy.
you’re an asshole who is apparently too good for the rules or request of the flight crew.
also my buttholes smell like cinnamon
Eyyy look at Mr. Fancy Pants over here with more than one butthole!
Commercial plane crashes are so unlikely: I’d happily take whatever the increase in risk is to not have safety briefings 😂
but also, airplane mode isn’t for the plane, it’s for the cell phone towers… leaving your phone on non-airplane mode once in the air is basically ddosing all the towers in the area… so yeah you should use airplane mode unless there’s a good reason not to such as a plane hijack… it’ll also save you some phone battery…
Wrong on all counts.
You have no clue how little some people fly, and some may only fly a few times in a lifetime. The safety briefing is for them, not jaded geniuses that don’t count the seat rows to the nearest emergency exit.
that’s not what I’m saying, I’m saying even if you’ve never flown before your dying need the safety briefing because it’s so unlikely 😂
Survivorship bias. “We have been doing this safety thing forever, but nothing bad ever happens. Let’s stop doing the safety thing!“
See also, “why pay for firefighters if there’s so few fires incidents on our city?”, and also “I’ve never been in a car crash, no need to use a seat belt.”
Every regulation is written in blood.
the probability of a fire is much higher and firefighters are underpaid, people need to care more about fires, and less about plane crashes…
similarly: we need more air traffic controllers and they should be paid more…
Yet yours is exactly the kind of stupid rethoric politicians use to convince constituents of defunding emergency and security services. Congratulations on being part of the problem.
the safety briefing is the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff…
the safety briefing doesn’t effect the probability of a crash…
Exactly, it’s not there for the unforseen improbable plane crash. It’s there for the moments people statistically actually die a preventable death, as in fucking up and misbehaving during evacuations, stampeding others to death or dying of asphyxia because they were too stupid to listen to the flight crew.
Interestingly, statistics reveal that over 95 percent of passengers involved in a plane crash survive, underscoring the importance of preparation and awareness in ensuring safety during flights.
https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/engineering/plane-crash-survival
Wrong again, genius. You need to stop, now.
I think the higher survival rate of plane crashes is actually a bad thing as that just incentivises crashing the plane 😅
SMH
Then it should be fine for the people who have heard the briefing dozens of times to keep playing on their phone.
I’m sure they’re the same self-centered people exiting the burning aircraft with their carry-on bags.
I’m surprised airplane mode is still a thing. It doesn’t matter for the purpose it was created, and letting users disconnect with a single toggle goes against the modern capitalist surveillance state. I guess it’d save battery since your phone wouldn’t be trying to connect to a new cell tower every few seconds?
Then again, on my Android tablet the mode doesn’t even disable the radios anymore. I can still use WiFi and Bluetooth just fine with it enabled. I’m not sure what airplane mode actually does these days.
I’m surprised too, since last time i’ve travelled by plane, if i recall it correctly, all passengers were asked to turn off their devices and there was nothing like “enable airplane mode”. But it’s only for taking off and landing. Maybe it’s different in different countries. Maybe my memory is hallucinating tho But i do have some questions about this mode and why it’s still called like this, not some other way. Well, your case just makes a good example of how outdated some things’ naming is.
Wifi, bluetooth, and cell signal all use different antennae and serve very different purposes.
It’s a tablet that doesn’t have cell coverage. As far as I can tell no form of connectivity it offers is blocked in airplane mode. I guess it’s only there because base Android includes the toggle?
And in older versions it was a proper killswitch for radios. My previous phones couldn’t use any connectivity with it enabled.
Yea it definitely used to be. I remember having to turn bluetooth back on to use some headphones.
They changed it at some point and added a toggle for “sensors” (at least on my android phone) that is different than the airplane mode toggle.
My best guess is this is because of accessories like Bluetooth headphones and services like inflight wifi and the need to turn back on those toggles causing some friction or confusion that makes people toggle off airplane mode which I believe breaks federal law in some countries.
It can cause issues on the ground as hundreds of phones try to connect to many overlapping cell towers at 800km/h.
…but they can’t from that high.
Doesn’t matter, the cell towers will still be barraged with hundreds of high intensity requests for several seconds. It’s akin to a very underpowered and inefficient radio jammer.
Put a base station on the aircraft, all phones can connect to it at low power.
it’s called wifi
That’s already a thing, I’m talking about putting a 4g/5g/6g base station on an aircraft.
with the prices they charge for the wifi, what do you think would happen to ticket costs if they added a 5G transciever?
“Welcome to your eight-hour flight. If you would like to use wifi, please sign up for only $40 per hour. Enjoy your voyage!”
The point isn’t to provide 5G but to reduce devices reaching outside the plane for connection…
if they could get carriers onboard to sponsor the installation then maybe.
It’s funny you think it would increase costs. It’s parts and bandwidth. GBs for cents.
it would increase costs because that’s what airlines do whenever they get a new gadget.
yeah that’s the main reason it’s kept around.
This is the closest most people will ever get to the buzzing the tower scene from Top Gun.
For what it’s worth the “kill all radios” button has existed longer than we have called it airplane mode. My Pocket PC had a switch on the side, not totally unlike the iPhone silent switch but you had to move it with the stylus.
Its a simple and easy request that costs nothing to adhere to. It’s a litmus test.
Get over it. Can’t have a goon sesh without something to get me going.
