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
Can i use bluetooth earphones while flying?
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.
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 In the back of my mind this has been repealed, but either way it is the likely impetus for labelling the setting as “Airplane mode.”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?
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.
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