[jusuchin]

I recently used maps.me while in Europe (Germany and Poland), with no data plan and only GPS on Airplane mode. With the downloaded maps, it was great. It even included entertainment, restaurants and some transportation options.

[freehunter]

I was actually surprised recently to find out that GPS works in airplane mode. Really fun to see what landmarks you're flying over when you see something cool out the airplane window.

[awqrre]

Wi-Fi also does works in airplane mode, on Android at least...

[jdmichal]

Your phone is not in airplane mode if it's making any kind of signal. You're just using Wi-Fi with the cellular modem disabled. Since GPS is only reading the satellite signals, it works fine.

[1ris]

The last time I was on a plane I was asked to turn on pairplane mode during take-off and the landing. I could use it in the air, there even was a (extremly expensive) GSM network. Can't remember if GPS works in Airplain mode, though. But I'd suspect it to do since GPS is only passive.

[awqrre]

Maybe not from a legal standpoint, but you can put your phone in airplane mode and then re-activate Wi-Fi and it will still be in airplane mode... unless they changed the behavior on newer Android OS

[kevinnk]

I was skeptical so I just attempted this on my Galaxy S5 and it turns out you're right! Very interesting.

[schoen]

I thought there was some kind of aviation safety rule against using radio receivers on board commercial flights, maybe because of retransmission of signals on the receiver's intermediate frequency?

[staticelf]

How does that work on for example Norwegian planes that offer wifi sometimes?

[yaur]

It didn't used to but was enabled in iOS 8.3.

[zoidb]

I discovered it recently as well, also it's pretty snappy due to the offline data.