Ban them, ban them all...

Guy Kewney makes and argument in eWeek that baning mobile phones in planes is over-reacting, but personally I'll be happy to see this ban extended indefinitely. While I understand his point that the risk from interference is miniscule, its still a risk. After all, everyone assessed the risk from box-cutters as miniscule until 9/11.

If there is a known risk that has caused interference before then why bother taking that risk? Even if there was never an incident in the less than one thousand flights I'm sure Kewney has taken in his life, there are millions of flights every year and a one in a million event that could down a plane is still one or more planes a year. Even one is one too many for the convenience of using a phone on a plane. I'll leave the technical assessment of mobile phone interference to experts over pundits with gut feeling convenience arguments.

The real problem is, that although 22 countries in the EU can standardise in the GSM phone network, they couldn't standardize a protocol by which phones could be remotely disabled, or put in a harmless low power mode. As useful would be the ability to enforce a silent ringer mode. Which brings me to my real objection about using phones on a plane...

Even if using a phone on a plane could be proved to be safe, its hard enough to get to sleep on a plane as it is without some dick-wad (that's a techinicaly term) beside you yacking away at full volume over the engine noise to tell some friend of his "yeah, I'm on the plane, I'm over the ocean, and would you believe there's this cute blonde three rows up I'd like to give some mile high attention". Yes, you better believe it, you will hear that kind of stuff flight after flight as soon as mobile phones are allowed and work on planes.

When you're jammed into a plane for 12+ hours (or even less) its bad enough to have to put up with ever phyiscal nuance of your seat companions, but to have to listen to their blathering for an equal period will be shear hell. I predict that within a month of phones working people will start calling to ban them, and on-flight "air rage" will start to escalate.

If you want to communicate on a plane it should be restricted to email and text messages, or quaint gesticulations of empty drink glasses and napkin waving.