How many times has this happened to you? You’re just about to complete a long flight and you pull out your cellphone to check something … only to realize you never turned it off like the flight attendant told you to hours earlier. OMG!!!
And yet the plane didn’t go down. Didn’t burst into flames. No emergency landing. The flight proceeded without incident, in fact. Not even a faux-calm warning from the captain that there were some instrument malfunctions going on that he couldn’t figure out.
In 1991, both the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Aviation Administration enacted rules banning cellphones from being turned on in flight. Twenty years later, the rule is still in effect (it’s now a federal law), and it’s as much a part of the takeoff procedure as being told to put your seat backs and tray tables up.
Things almost changed in 2004, when the FCC started investigating whether to lift the ban on cellphones in flight: Technologies were being developed at that time that could hand off a cellphone call from an in-flight plane to a satellite or a base station on the ground, sort of like having a mini-cell tower attached to the wing.
But by 2007, the FCC abandoned this effort. Officially the reason cited was that the agency — 16 years later — still didn’t have enough information to determine whether cellphones posed a legitimate threat to plane instrumentation. However, most pundits at the time speculated that public pressure kept the FCC from lifting the ban not for safety reasons but rather because, when polled, travelers overwhelmingly said they didn’t want people to be able to yack away the flight in the seat next to them.
It’s all bunk, said Carl Biersack of the Inflight Passenger Communications Coalition, which advocates for in-flight cell service. According to the group, safety concerns about phones on planes have long since been voided, and you need look no farther than Europe, where in-flight cell service is now commonplace and where scads of regulations and rulings have found no hazards from the practice.
The IPCC says 139 nations on five continents have approved in-flight cell service and that 93 percent of passengers surveyed say they are pleased with the service offered. Some 7 million air-to-ground calls have been completed to date, with minimal to no complaints sent to the 22 airlines that offer service. If there were a safety problem with in-flight calling, we’d surely have heard about it by now.
Biersack said getting phones on U.S. planes is really just a matter of education. "If people realized there wasn’t a safety issue," he said, "there would be a demand for services that offer constant communication. That calling frenzy that happens before you push away from the gate — I call it 'tarmac time' — wouldn’t happen."
None of that may matter, though, as Americans still seem overwhelmingly uninterested in even having the option to talk while in the air. An MSNBC online poll earlier this month on the topic found a whopping 85 percent of voters saying that passengers should not be allowed to use phones on planes and that "people should just shut up and fly."
And perhaps those who do have the opportunity to make calls in flight actually feel that way, too: The IPCC says the average in-flight call lasts just 53 seconds.