Wing tones

Question: I’m noticing an increasing number of people who don’t turn off cellphones in flight. What exactly are the safety concerns? Perhaps if people knew more about what could happen, they would obey.

Sandi Gateman

Los Angeles

Answer: Maybe, but I wouldn’t bet a week’s pay on it, especially now that 16 international carriers are providing service.

But the U.S. still bans the use of in-flight cellphones and probably won’t lift its restriction any time soon, partly because of a bit of back-and-forth between two government agencies and partly because of efforts to legislate our manners.

As for safety, the Federal Communications Commission’s website, under its cellphone FAQs for children, says, “Some of the places that you should never use your mobile phone are inside hospitals and airplanes. When you make or receive calls, electromagnetic waves are sent through the air. Hospitals have a lot of electronic devices that monitor patient’s heartbeats and other things when they are getting surgery or when they are recovering from an illness. When electromagnetic waves try to go through them, the devices sometimes stop working. You can imagine how bad that would be for doctors and nurses in hospitals who are trying to save lives. . . . It’s the same thing in airplanes because they use computers to fly through the air. If the computers don’t work properly, the airplane may not go the right direction or fly at the right height, or they may even crash! Next time you get on a plane, make sure that you turn off your mobile phone so that everyone can have a safe flight.”

Whether you agree that science supports this is another matter, although I think we can all agree that crashing is, in fact, bad.

But the FCC and the Federal Aviation Administration don’t always agree which one is the buzz kill here.

A spokesman for the FCC told me the ban on in-flight cellphones comes from the FAA. A spokesman for the FAA said no, it’s the FCC.

None of this may matter anyway because there’s legislation afoot to ban cellphones in flight because they’re a nuisance.

Rep. Peter DeFazio, a Democrat from Oregon, introduced legislation last year that promotes peace and quiet on planes. It’s the HANG UP Act (Halting Airplane Noise to Give Us Peace Act). He contends that uncontrolled yakking can turn a flight into a sentence to hell. (Are there degrees of hell? Isn’t flying already hell?)

But Carl Biersack, spokesperson for the Inflight Passenger Communications Coalition, thinks the cost of a midair call (about $5 a minute on those foreign carriers), the lack of privacy and the aircraft’s ability to limit the number of calls that can be made (he says there’s a maximum of six), would keep the chatter under control. He favors a study that would answer the safety and serenity questions.

Facts or finger-pointing? Anecdotes or evidence? Seems like an easy call to me.

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