So, I hope you all realize that the rest of the world is starting to realize how stupid these regulations are. Singapore air, for one, has an SMS service in the air which allows (on a roaming basis, so expensive) one to send and receive SMS. http://www.singaporeair.com/jsp/cms/en_UK/flying_with_us/inflight-connectivity.jsp
As someone who flies >200k miles per year (and might have even checked his email on roll or approach from time to time), I would never get on a plane I thought to be so vulnerable that a cell phone signal could cause interference to the point of interfering the flight. You'd have to be crazy to. Anyone who believes that no one has a phone turned on every time they get on the plane is crazy.
Finally, I can tell you with certainty that you will not get a signal on most carriers beyond probably 5-10k feet. Cell towers are shielded above. This is not to keep flyers honest, but because in the olden days one phone hitting 10s to hundreds of towers (as happens when you have clean line of site from the air) bogged down the system.
The regulation is very dumb. There is no reason not to txt or send and receive email on takeoff and landing.
If safety is the real reason on takeoff and landing, go ahead and ban listening to anything but in flight entertainment during takeoff and landing (IFE cuts in to the audio with announcements from the cockpit and FAs). On the other hand, if it's interference, don't ban ipods.
The logic is completely borked.
As someone who flies >200k miles per year (and might have even checked his email on roll or approach from time to time), I would never get on a plane I thought to be so vulnerable that a cell phone signal could cause interference to the point of interfering the flight. You'd have to be crazy to. Anyone who believes that no one has a phone turned on every time they get on the plane is crazy.
Finally, I can tell you with certainty that you will not get a signal on most carriers beyond probably 5-10k feet. Cell towers are shielded above. This is not to keep flyers honest, but because in the olden days one phone hitting 10s to hundreds of towers (as happens when you have clean line of site from the air) bogged down the system.
The regulation is very dumb. There is no reason not to txt or send and receive email on takeoff and landing.
If safety is the real reason on takeoff and landing, go ahead and ban listening to anything but in flight entertainment during takeoff and landing (IFE cuts in to the audio with announcements from the cockpit and FAs). On the other hand, if it's interference, don't ban ipods.
The logic is completely borked.