Are phones on planes really so dangerous?

No, I used to date a pilot. He rang me from the cockpit on more than one occasion.

Well fuck me. Sincere apologies!

He left BA 5/6 years ago. Definitely no WiFi on the majority of their flights when he left.

I’m posting this in flight mode. The WiFi is working.

Try putting your phone in flight mode, then turn wifi on, and then do your Google search.

From memory, open to correction, BA have had wifi on most of the Longhaul fleet for well over five years..(might be best part of ten) but what you got.on the day depended on the fleet and within the fleet the aircraft and/or cabin upgrade state.

I think at least some of their shorthaul fleet might have had it for, again, five years, but it was a slow patchy introduction and I think it still might not be universal.

Flight mode kills only the phone signal, it usually leaves wifi up for use on suitably equipped aircraft

What? That's not true at all. Try putting your mobile on airplane mode then doing a google search through your phones wifi connection!

I have forgotten to turn my iPad on to flight mode a few times and found loads of texts informing me of the roaming charges for the countries I have flown over, so they must pick up some signal.

Well speaking as an ex commercial pilot I can tell you it's not complete bullshit..at 30k you might get a signal and get a text off, it depends...

If you were sat on older aircraft whilst sending it you might also start to see the pressurisation outflow valves move in the direction you don't want them to go at altitude (Boeing actually went as far as warning that was a symptom of mobile phone use and I saw it once)

That's not so much a problem on new aircraft...

As for the "worse weather conditions" comment - you really do not want to compromise autoland performance....

It wasn’t - BA have only recently introduced WiFi on their planes.

This must have been via WiFi as I’ve forgotten to switch to flight mode and accidentally turned it off mid flight so many times and never had signal. I usually find out because my phone starts buzzing when we get to a low altitude and about to land and it reconnects.

But on some airlines you can make calls on WiFi so they aren’t doing a great job of stopping this behaviour…

I don't think there is enough emphasis on not putting lithium batteries in the hold. Just a tick box in online check-in. Needs to be a global campaign about this.

No.

Even in the worst weather conditions. It’s bullshit. My brother was cabin crew. It’s to stop you taking calls etc at 30,000 feet and pissing other people off! He used to have his phone on normal and he would text us all when he was on his break.

According to the FAA, it can interfere with the pilot’s headset, and with screens, but largely in older planes. They don’t need to ban them, it’s not going to cause the plane to immediately nosedive. If it happens, a pilot can put a message over the tannoy for people to check their phones are off.

The apps will probably work via the wifi.

Your phone has two, maybe three ways of connecting with the outside world (phone signal, Wifi, Bluetooth).

As far as the aviation authorities are concerned the phone signal might well be problematic, OTOH most of time wifi/bluetooth aren't considered an issue.

Flight mode kills only the phone signal, it usually leaves wifi up for use on suitably equipped aircraft.

However the authorities really don't want anything in the passenger cabin transmitting anything when the aircraft is performing an autoland in low visibility because any interference could cause real difficulties, so thats when everything that might transmit or emit anything, mobiles, ipads, tablets etc etc, usually have to go off.

They do. I have flight mode turned on now but I am still connected to the internet via wifi.

Well some airlines have apps you use during the flight for entertainment so they wouldnt work on flight mode

They wouldnt allowed this of you cant use your phone

Did the plane have wifi?

Duplicate, apols

That's not really the case anymore..I.know this is a bit of a repeat of a pp I made but I guess it's worth a re-run..

Way back when I started flying commercially (late 1980s) the early mobiles were analogue,.pushed out a lot if power and aircraft systems weren't hardened against them...

You could sometimes hear if one was on (distinctive clicking or buzz in headsets).

Move forward to around 2000 and phones were digital, pushed out lower power and aircraft were better protected.

I don't think I saw evidence or heard phone interference much post the mid-nineties...

Where I workee allowed phones on with flight mode off immediately after landing maybe 20 years ago and I never heard any interference or had them cause problems with ATC comms whilst taxiing in.

The last flight I was on said put phones on flight mode and we can all now talk to one another.

But you don’t really think that happens on airplanes do you?

Many posters who work for airlines have already said that phones interfere rarely to the point many haven’t heard it.

you can’t don’t really think it’s like the early 2000s when your computer screen would distort when a message was coming in 😂? They would just ban phones entirely if that was the impact.

If you’ve ever turned a phone on and had it affect your home radio with that morse code sounding bip bip bips you’ll know what the pilots hear on their radios when they’re trying to hear what Air Traffic Control are saying to them. It’s particularly bad immediately after landing when everyone switches phones back on while the pilots are trying to get directions to the gate they need to get to in an airport they might not know well

Ahh bless, are you a young person? https://vm.tiktok.com/ZNdtCkfuE/

There was no way of the crew knowing (other than by eye) when I was working but things may have changed in the last handful of years

Have to say you really don't want any risk of radio frequency interference on a low visibility approach so it's not a rule to take liberties with.

We were waiting for a flight years back and got chatting to a really interesting guy who was an explosives expert.

I’ll never forget him saying the scariest thing to him is, they allow phones on planes, and never check if it is a working phone or a dummy. If you put a battery sized amount of explosive in a dummy phone, it would blow the side off a plane. I assume they can pick this up in the scanning but he reckoned it would be fairly easy.

As I understand it there is an issue with interference which can cause problems with comms and navigation. The reason there aren’t any accidents is, if it happened, the pilots would be aware of it long before it caused any danger. They’d hear buzzing in their headsets. I’d assume at that point there would be a call across the cabin for everyone to make sure their phones are off.