Every flight is the same. The captain asks everyone to switch their phones to airplane mode, and the entire cabin obediently flips the switch, somewhere in the back of their minds believing that otherwise the plane might crash.
So, relax. No phone in history has ever crashed a single plane. Not even once. And the ban itself wasn’t even invented by pilots.
But why airplane mode is actually needed is a much more interesting story than the tale of falling planes.
Phones were banned for the sake of towers on the ground, not for the sake of aircraft.
The ban on in-flight phone calls was introduced in 1991, and it wasn’t the aviation authorities who imposed it, but the American Communications Commission. And they weren’t worried about the aircraft, but about the cellular network on the ground.
It sounds a bit strange… A cell tower is designed to let you drive along the ground, carefully transmitting your phone from one tower to the next. Now imagine a phone at an altitude of ten kilometers, hurtling along at nearly nine hundred per hour. It sees dozens of towers at once and tries to lock onto them all.
For a terrestrial network, it’s roughly the equivalent of one subscriber shouting into every microphone in the city at once. That’s what they were afraid of: that the flying phones would clog the cellular network below.
So, from the very beginning, the ban was about order in ground communications, not flight safety. It’s ironic that today’s phones almost never use that ancient frequency, and yet the rule has remained in place ever since.
What about interference with the aircraft? There was fear, but almost no evidence.
You might rightly ask: OK, the network, but we were always afraid that the phone would mess up the navigation. Where did this come from?
It was done out of caution. Older aircraft from the seventies and eighties were much more tolerant of interference, and electronics in a passenger’s pocket could theoretically generate a parasitic signal that would fall into the frequency range of the navigation device. Theoretically. So the regulators simply decided it was better to be safe than sorry, to have everything turned off just in case.
But when they began seriously investigating this, the picture turned out to be bleak. Both in the 1990s and in recent studies, experts have yet to find a single confirmed case of a passenger’s phone actually disrupting an aircraft system. And new airliners are specifically designed and certified to ignore phones in the cabin.
Then why do they still require airplane mode?
There are several reasons, and they are reasonable.
First of all, it’s still the law. The ban hasn’t been lifted; it’s written into the rules.
Secondly, there’s only one time when it’s truly better to hold onto your phone: during takeoff and landing. That’s when the slightest chance of interference is at least somewhat significant, because devices operate at the limit of accuracy close to the ground. And it’s precisely at ground level that the phone reaches the ground-based towers and begins broadcasting its signal. At altitude, all this is irrelevant, but during those few minutes near the ground, it makes sense.
But the main reason is that most aviation accidents occur during takeoff and landing. And at precisely these moments, the crew needs you to be present, not on your phone. And a person glued to a screen simply misses the safety briefing.
Basically, disabling airplane mode works like a gentle nudge, pulling you away from the screen just when it could save your life. And asking everyone to click a single button at once is much easier than individually persuading everyone to stop and listen.
Where radio waves really scared aviation
The only instance in recent years where wireless communications have truly alarmed aviation wasn’t caused by a phone in the cabin, but by 5G towers on the ground, right near airports.
In early 2022, the US switched on the new 5G standard at frequencies around 3.7 gigahertz. The problem was that the radio altimeter, a device used by aircraft to measure their altitude during landing, operates very close to the 4 gigahertz frequency, especially in foggy conditions when the runway is difficult to see. The margin between these frequencies turned out to be too narrow, raising concerns that powerful 5G towers near the runway would interfere with the altimeter’s readings at the most crucial moment.
There was a commotion. Some foreign airlines simply canceled flights to the US in January 2022. Eventually, an agreement was reached: telecom operators around 50 airports throttled their transmitters for six months, creating buffer zones, and aircraft altimeters were replaced and filtered to prevent them from being triggered by the interfering signal. Incidentally, there was no such fuss in Europe, where 5G operates on frequencies further from the altimeter and at lower power.
And what’s the bottom line?
Airplane mode during takeoff and landing provides some protection against interference and prevents your phone from interfering with ground networks, but most importantly, during these dangerous moments, it keeps you grounded in reality, not staring at a screen.
Since you’ve read this far and are curious about how aviation works, I’m writing about exactly that in my Telegram channel, “Pilot’s Everyday Life .” We’ll explore what’s happening in global aviation, play games where you’ll step into the shoes of a pilot, and discuss the latest developments in the Russian aviation industry.
