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[–] 56 points 5 months ago* (30 children)

I'm surprised airplane mode is still a thing. It doesn't matter for the purpose it was created, and letting users disconnect with a single toggle goes against the modern capitalist surveillance state. I guess it'd save battery since your phone wouldn't be trying to connect to a new cell tower every few seconds?

Then again, on my Android tablet the mode doesn't even disable the radios anymore. I can still use WiFi and Bluetooth just fine with it enabled. I'm not sure what airplane mode actually does these days.

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  • [–] 44 points 5 months ago (23 children)

    It can cause issues on the ground as hundreds of phones try to connect to many overlapping cell towers at 800km/h.

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  • [–] 14 points 5 months ago (18 children)

    Put a base station on the aircraft, all phones can connect to it at low power.

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  • [–] 15 points 5 months ago (17 children)
  • [–] 7 points 5 months ago (16 children)

    That's already a thing, I'm talking about putting a 4g/5g/6g base station on an aircraft.

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  • [–] 0 points 5 months ago* (15 children)

    with the prices they charge for the wifi, what do you think would happen to ticket costs if they added a 5G transciever?

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (3 children)

    It’s funny you think it would increase costs. It’s parts and bandwidth. GBs for cents.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (2 children)

    it would increase costs because that's what airlines do whenever they get a new gadget.

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  • [–] 13 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    Wifi, bluetooth, and cell signal all use different antennae and serve very different purposes.

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago* (2 children)

    It's a tablet that doesn't have cell coverage. As far as I can tell no form of connectivity it offers is blocked in airplane mode. I guess it's only there because base Android includes the toggle?

    And in older versions it was a proper killswitch for radios. My previous phones couldn't use any connectivity with it enabled.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    Yea it definitely used to be. I remember having to turn bluetooth back on to use some headphones.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago

    They changed it at some point and added a toggle for "sensors" (at least on my android phone) that is different than the airplane mode toggle.

    My best guess is this is because of accessories like Bluetooth headphones and services like inflight wifi and the need to turn back on those toggles causing some friction or confusion that makes people toggle off airplane mode which I believe breaks federal law in some countries.

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  • [–] 7 points 5 months ago

    For what it’s worth the “kill all radios” button has existed longer than we have called it airplane mode. My Pocket PC had a switch on the side, not totally unlike the iPhone silent switch but you had to move it with the stylus.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    I'm surprised too, since last time i've travelled by plane, if i recall it correctly, all passengers were asked to turn off their devices and there was nothing like "enable airplane mode". But it's only for taking off and landing. Maybe it's different in different countries. Maybe my memory is hallucinating tho But i do have some questions about this mode and why it's still called like this, not some other way. Well, your case just makes a good example of how outdated some things' naming is.

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  • [–] 29 points 5 months ago* (21 children)

    I don’t think that.

    The odds of any phone interfering, interfering with a critical system, interfering with that system at a critical time, and interfering substantially enough to cause a deviation that would be not caught by the crew, and the deviation was significant enough to cause damage…are miniscule.

    Turn your phone off to hear the safety briefing.

    I just think you’re an asshole who is apparently too good for the rules or request of the flight crew.

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  • [–] 7 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    Theres an old conspiracy theory, pre smart phone, that it was about preventing terrorists using phones as missile guidance. Basically, if you see a cellphone jumping 1 tower to the next, you can tell speed by distance and time between towers' coverage areas.

    They didnt want phones on planes creating constant false positives theyd have to verify against flight logs, etc, and obviously didnt want to give enemies ideas ideas, hence the line about interference, but of interference were a likely hazard, theyd be locking up phones for the flight.

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  • [–] 6 points 5 months ago

    You’re conflating two things. One is GPS, which is designed to stop functioning above 1,000 knots to prevent it from being used in a missile.

    The other is the interference of which I spoke having to do with electronics like cellphones that operate at harmonics that overlay frequencies used by aircraft navigation systems. It can be demonstrated that they do indeed interfere, but so many things have to happen to make the interference happen it’s wildly unlikely. So many things have changed over the years that prevent this from happening, like cellphones operate at lower power, personal electronics are better shielded, and operate at lower power. On top of that, the aircraft’s RF and EM shielding would have to be damaged in just the right spot, and the electronic device would have to be right near the damage.

    As far as cell towers go, most phones are too weak to make a good connection from all but the lowest altitudes, and you’re moving fast enough that it can’t handshake the next tower and negotiate the connection quick enough to have a good connection except maybe st the slowest speeds and altitude on approach for landing.

    I did a minor study on this exact subject, but it’s been decades, so the details are fuzzy.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    And that was/is possible at that height?

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago

    It's not. Hence the conspiracy thing. The pain with cellphones in planes is that they can see the tower, but the tower can't see them. So they punch the transmission power to 100%. Worse still, they can see not one but probably several dozen towers at the same time, trying to reach them all in hopes one of them can hear them.

    Now multiply that by 80 to 200 phones on a plane. This will not interfere with electronic guidance systems or computers in the plane, but will also never actually last for long enough on a cell to establish a connection, but all the requests will busy the tower. So cell towers get briefly radio jammed as the plane flies over them.

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    [–] 26 points 5 months ago

    Won’t kill the plane. Will kill your battery. fast while trying to find and connect to cell towers that are too far away

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  • [–] 9 points 5 months ago

    Get over it. Can't have a goon sesh without something to get me going.

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago

    Its a simple and easy request that costs nothing to adhere to. It's a litmus test.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago

    Fun story:

    Be me in 2019 on a flight somewhere between Texas & DC. My phone is most assuredly on airplane mode. I have an idea pop into my head and I want to text someone in Maryland about it, so out of curiosity I start texting them while I'm in airplane mode. We were chatting on Google Hangouts I think it's an obsolete app now but the icon was like this " one set of quotation marks in green, if you remember that app. From my location in an airplane at maximum cruising altitude I was able to have a full chat conversation with someone hundreds of miles away on the ground while my phone was in airplane mode. 🤷🏼‍♀️ How that was possible will forever be a mystery to me.

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