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
Basically, a mobile phone is a radio, so it is constantly transmitting and looking for a base station to connect to. Some of the navigation instruments on airplanes can *potentially* be affected by mobile phone signals, which might feed incorrect or contradictory information into the flight computers, which is generally considers to be A Bad Thing. As I understand it, their relatively little proof of this (there’s no accident I know of where passenger’s electronic devices emissions are cited as a factor), but the FAA ordered a ban anyway in the 90s out of an abundance of caution and no one’s overturned it. Its been relaxed somewhat with stuff like Bluetooth and Wi-Fi being allowed at the operators choice.
also, airplane mode will save device battery, as the phone is not burning power screaming into the void, looking for a tower thats too far away to ever hear it.
edited to add: theirs also a secondary issue with hundreds of phones rapidly connecting and dropping of towers on the take-off and approach routes, which is a quality of life issue for those people that the airports might care about, but not a factor in the actual FFA ban that made “airplane mode” a thing to begin with.
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