Airplane Mode…

Closing out another long week of business travel to the Midwest… As I was traveling this week I had a thought about “airplane mode”. What I mean is placing your smart phone into airplane mode (non-transmitting cellular signals) once the main aircraft door has been closed. In my own personal opinion, I have always thought the FAA was a little behind the times on passenger technology being carried on and used during flight. Do you really think cellular transmitting devices interfere with the aircraft instruments? Honestly I have no idea, but do you think most customers know or even take the time to place their device(s) into airplane mode. Since I fly 2 to 3 weeks out of the month I am going to take a guess here and say NO. As a matter of fact, the nice lady sitting next to me on my last flight had no idea what that was or even meant, so I kindly showed her. It seems that recently on my travels with Delta Airlines the flight attendants have changed their posture on this request and now look over passenger’s shoulders waiting to catch them in the act and follow up with “Airplane Mode” sir/ma’am. If I do a basic calculation of my flight, I am on today the plane holds roughly 200 passengers and most passengers today have two mobile devices capable of transmitting cellular signals. The simple math here is that potentially 400 devices could be sending and receiving cellular data while communicating with a cellular tower. If it was possible to have all of these mobile devices interfering wouldn’t you think the aircraft instruments would either run a different frequency or have some sort of jamming technology on-board? Common sense here would say that the aircraft would be running on government licensed frequencies and channels, so this wasn’t possible. As I write this article I don’t have Google at my fingertips, so I guess I will leave it to you to answer my questions…

Happy flying

-Daren