Few days ago I was flying by plane and stewards asked us to turn our devices to Airplane Mode. But why is that?
In: Technology
Airplane mode turns off the radios on the phone. They want you to do that for a couple reasons. First, they just don’t want you making calls in flight because it’s annoying and because it can distract you when you should be paying attention for safety reasons. Second, having hundreds of cell phones whizzing by at hundreds of miles an hour from a position where they can reach dozens of cell towers at the same time can mess with the mobile phone network.
There are times when you don’t want your cell phone to be radiating RF (those are the invisible waves used by Wi-Fi and cellular towers). An example is when making scientific or medical measurements using sensitive equipment. There are also government and other regulations about where and to what level a device can radiate RF signals. For example, when above 10,000 ft in the US, say, at cruising altitude on an airplane? In the back of my mind this has been repealed, but either way it is the likely impetus for labelling the setting as “Airplane mode.”
As a bonus, this has the effect of doing a soft rest on the radio components and can be an effective way to troubleshoot or recover a decide caught in a problematic state!
I flew for the first time in 20 years recently, and when we took off I promptly put my phone in airplane mode. Nobody else around me did, and most people were watching TikToks on a flight without WiFi. I was flabbergasted. Nobody took any phone calls, but they were definitely using data. It’s my understanding that flight navigation instruments don’t catch interference from cellular data transmission anymore, which is good, but why do air travel companies still tell people to put their phones in airplane mode? Why can’t airplane mode just disable calls if they just don’t want a bunch of people talking like assholes on the plane? What are we even doing anymore?
Phones dont interfere with navigational equipment. If that was the case, they would not be allowed the whole flight, It’s the same reason why ATMs are slow as heck when processing withdrawal of funds and why the TSA exists despite having caught not a single terrorist since 2001. It’s security theater so people have more trust.
Imagine your phone is like a super loud, chatty friend who loves to talk to a lot of people at once. Now, think of the airplane as a very important classroom where the pilot and the airplane’s systems need to concentrate very hard to fly the plane safely.
When your phone is not in Airplane Mode, it sends out signals, like shouting really loud. These signals can sometimes mix up the important messages the pilot needs to hear, like if someone shouted in class when the teacher was giving instructions.
Your phone tries to talk to cell towers on the ground to stay connected, just like trying to wave at lots of friends at the same time. When you’re high up in the sky, your phone tries to reach many towers at once, which can cause a big mess and confuse the cell towers.
So, when you turn on Airplane Mode, it’s like telling your phone to take a quiet nap. It stops shouting and waving, making it easier for the airplane to fly safely and for the pilot to concentrate on getting everyone to their destination. Plus, it helps your phone save its battery, just like resting helps you save energy!
Can i use bluetooth earphones while flying?
To add to all that, mobile manufactures need to add a mode that allows disabling cellular transmission which you may need for whatever reason.
It used to be a cellphone could actually cause errors in the flight equipment. It doesn’t anymore, but there’s two other reasons, why you‘re still asked to do so:
1. a cell phone that has lost its signal will keep searching for it. Its using a lot more energy and a lot more electromagnetism than when it is actually connected. With a whole lot of cellphones in one plane, that would really add up.
2. So people don’t make calls. Can you imagine 200 people in a metal tube calling home at the same time? It would incredibly loud, everyone trying to be audible.
Similar questions have been asked in the past. [Here is one answer](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9fyxro/eli5_why_do_electronic_devices_phones_laptops_etc/e60noql/) from six years ago.
Airplanes use a ton of radios for various different things. They obviously use radios to talk to air traffic control, but airplanes also use radios to avoid running in to other airplanes, to communicate via satellite to air traffic control on the ground, to broadcast their location to air traffic control, to land safely, and to tell how high they are above the ground.
Back in the 80s when cellphones were brand new, there was a bit of a concern that the radio signals from cellphones could potentially interfere with all the various radio signals that airplanes used, so it was decided that everyone who boards an airplane should turn off their cellphones. For the longest time, this was all that was needed. Cellphones didn’t do much other than make calls, so it was perfectly acceptable to turn off your phone while flying.
Then, phones got the ability to be more than just phones. You could watch movies, you could play games, you could draw, take pictures, etc. The capabilities expanded rapidly! But there was still a lingering fear that cellphones could mess with airplane radios. So, cellphone manufacturers created a switch on phones that said “Turn off all wireless communication features” so that you could still use your cellphone to watch movies, play games, use apps, etc. while you were on an airplane with nothing else to do. Your phone isn’t using radio signals? Then there’s no way it can interfere with the plane’s own radios. They called it “Airplane Mode” because that was the most common situation in which you’d want to keep using your phone without it being able to use any wireless communication systems! The name just stuck over time, and it’s become the catch-all term in technology to describe the act of turning off all wireless communications on a device!
Nowadays, even though we now know that cellphones don’t *really* interfere with the radios that airplanes use, it’s a bit redundant. Although, since your cellphone will constantly be searching for cellphone towers and you’re not likely to get a signal while in the air, using airplane mode helps to save battery when you’re flying and don’t need a connection.
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