Aboard the Red-Ear Flight

An irresistible force has seized control of American decision-making. Convenience.

Food, travel, business, shopping, arguments: Convenience rules. Entire chains of stores peddle convenience and fast foods, which boost heart disease but do so conveniently. So a strong sense of inevitability pervades news of federal agency consideration of airliner cellphone use. It’d be convenient.

Freed from the limits of standard phones, cellphone users gained the ability to invade the personal space of nonusers anywhere. They’ve been neither shy nor thoughtful. Currently, however, even without flight attendant patrols, cellphones go deaf and mute way below airline cruising altitudes. This is inconvenient and limits in-flight calls to those $4-a-minute seatback sets. They were marvels until unlimited cell minutes made them less convenient.

If cellphone users think they MUST TALK THIS LOUD in ground-bound chatter, imagine their invasive volume at 35,000 feet, strapped into the next seat for the life of their battery or flight. Then imagine the celled cacophony of a 747 packed with 350 bored Americans armed with unlimited minutes and miles, gabbing their way across Colorado and Nebraska and Iowa and Illinois and....

Let’s be honest, triple-A and 911 calls aside, on a scale of 1 to 10, the importance value of most cellphone conversations ranks right around 1 to 1.2. Envision six hours of “Well, after I sat an entire hour in that frigid place the doctor finally comes in and he says to me, he says ... “ or “So she’s like, Hello? She turns to him with that look and she says, ‘What did you say?’ ” True, hearing the slightly altered details of such repeated reports to friend after friend would allow fellow passengers to gauge their row mate’s honesty. But such forcibly eavesdropped conversations make 545 mph seem inconveniently slow.

Some might pray the technical hurdles to in-flight cellphones will prove formidable or the tappy-tap-tap of laptop use up there will prove more convenient. What about cell-free sections, or entire flights? It paid off with nonsmoking.

Or bring back those good old isolating phone booths and add seat belts.

Half a century’s civilian aviation experience indicates that cramming paying humans into high-flying metal cocoons for hours of suspended comfort doesn’t elicit the best manners or thoughtfulness. Music, satellite TV and expanded elbow room smooth some edges. But convenient cellphones in airplanes may prove, well, inconvenient.