Please secure all personal electronic devices and place them in airplane mode — and ensure that they remain in airplane mode for the foreseeable future.
The federal government is scrapping an Obama-era plan to allow cellphone usage on planes.
In an order released on Nov. 27, the Federal Communications Commission maintained a ban on the in-flight use of cellphone voice and data services by ending a rulemaking proceeding that it started nearly seven years ago, which had proposed to “revise outdated rules and adopt consistent new rules governing mobile communications services aboard airborne aircraft.”
The FCC’s termination letter reads, “The record is insufficient to determine any reasonable solution that would strike an appropriate balance of competing interests.” In other words, some commenters liked the idea, and some hated it.
One would think that every person who has ever flown on an airplane, except perhaps those in the bottom 5% of self-awareness, opposes the idea of cellphone conversations on a plane. Things that are merely annoying on Earth become insufferable on airplanes. There’s nowhere you can go. If people could speak and swear as freely about Trump, new kitchen cabinets, or their persistent rash during flight as they do on the ground, airplanes would become powder kegs.
That was one flight attendant’s point when he wrote the FCC to oppose a liberalization of cellphone usage: “Expanding access to mobile wireless services onboard aircraft while in flight may seem like a good proposal if all passengers were equally responsible and considerate of one another, but the documented record of behavior in these two worlds would seem to indicate that they should remain separate.”
Phone calls and small enclosed cabins full of strangers do not mix.
