[jdavis703]

> It's just theatre. It's there mostly to stop you playing with your phone and pay attention to the flight attendant doing the safety speech.

They frequently give the safety demonstration before requesting people turn on airplane mode. And besides, there’s no safety demonstration when landing.

> If this was truly a problem, really truly actually causing radio interference, this wouldn't be allowed.

And they would drug and alcohol test pilots before flight, yet you can still read NTSB reports showing toxicology in fatal crashes.

> Famously, some of the victims of the 9/11 hijackings got to make phone calls from the air, and/or received SMS texts notifying them of what happened to the other planes.

Those were satellite phones (or used special ground-based receivers) they weren’t regular cell phones. And they were embedded in your seat-back and presumably certified as being airworthy.

[bananabreakfast]

Their cell phones didn't use cell phone technology?

What on earth are you talking about?

[p_l]

The calls that I recall being reported on used telephones available to flight crew for communications unrelated to flight and possibly made available for crazy prices to passengers.

You generally can't receive cell phone signal at segment of airliner flight except immediately after takeoff and in final stages of landing, due to optimizations involved in providing said signal (directional segment antennas, with attempts to beam-form towards specific terminals in latest versions). In practice I had hard time and required special tricks to keep a call running above 500m AGL and it probably depended on BTS located on hill above my reference point.

[ceejayoz]

I thought most of the 9/11 passenger calls came from the eye-poppingly expensive satellite phones in the seat backs.