What happens if no one turns on airplane mode on a full commercial flight?
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Usually nothing. Airplane systems are very robust. The only thing that might happen is your phone will get hot and lose battery quickly while trying to talk to the antennas on the ground.
Some more detail which goes further than the ELI5-take:
The only risk that remains apart from your phone desperately turning up it’s power to try to make a connection, is it messing with airplane altitude sensors. Not the usual ones that work with pressure, but those that work with radio waves. Unfortunately, the waves that have always been used for those radio altitude sensors are now also used for 5G phone connection because the phone companies bought them. The airplanes are going to keep using those waves too, but now, if you have a 5G enabled phone not in airplane mode during landing, the following could happen: 5G antennas use a new technology, basically it directs its power to the phone it’s trying to communicate with. What that means is that the waves from the phone antenna is pointed directly at the aircraft, which has been proven to mess with the radio altitude sensors. During landing, this could be very dangerous.
This is only a problem in the US, almost everywhere else in the world these frequencies are reserved for the aviation sector, and that’s why at some US-airports with these special antennas installed, airplanes can’t rely on their radio altitude sensors. This solution could still lead to a dangerous situation, for example in bad weather, where the pilots have to rely on that sensor to know where they are. But that’s just how it is now, unfortunately.
Source: Studying aviation engineer with a personal affinity in electronics and data communication.
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