Using your personal phone while flying

Some airlines in Europe & the Middle East have just started to offer the service of using your mobile phones while on a plane. As a result US regulators like the FCC are considering lifting their twenty year old ban to allow passengers to use their cell phones on planes. The first step was conducting a passenger survey; which resulted in 78% of Americans to whom have flown at least 4 times in the past year, they said they do not want the ban lifted. Feeling the idea would “make an already cranky, uncomfortable travel experience exponentially worse”.

Currently, calls are not allowed during takeoff or landing, this rule also applies overseas on all flights; but efforts towards relaxing those guidelines have been looked at. According to the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA); it would permit passengers to use devices like tablet computers and e-readers during take-off and landing. That decision was made after a review committee determined that most commercial aircrafts can tolerate radio interference signals from such devices. As of now, only Virgin Atlantic are the only group allowing passengers to make calls on its airline Airbus A330 exclusively between flights from London to New York. However, calls would have to be ended within 250 miles of US airspace. Mobile access for that flight is provided by AeroMobile; and as for passenger annoyance only six people will be allowed to talk at once, which is only due to limited bandwidth available on the system, and phones still have to be turned off at take-off and landing.

The first airline to allow flyers to use their phones while in the air began in 2008, with Dubai-based Emirates. Internet calls; passengers have been using existing in-flight internet technology offered on a number of planes around the world. This also includes using Skype; in that umbrella of internet technology, its being charged at $10 for using the WiFi on some flights. The only issue with Skype from passengers that were surveyed was that picture was good, but sound isn’t always of quality due to the plane’s background noise.