The Real Reasons Phones Are Kept Off Planes 642
jcatcw writes "Mike Elgan argues that the the real reason that cell phones calls are not allowed is fear of crowd control problems if calls are allowed during flight. Also, the airlines like keeping passengers ignorant about ground conditions. The two public reasons, interference with other systems, could easily be tested, but neither the FAA nor the FCC manage to do such testing."
Vapidity all round (Score:0, Interesting)
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?co
Now, from FTA:
Yes, PH3AR teh information! Teh interweb must also be teh BANNED!!! What would happen if we let people view things like THIS [digg.com] on their cellphones?
But the "What's wrong with the ban?" section is lame too:
If we use cellphones, then TEH TERRORISTS HAVE WON!!!!11!!eleven!!
At least we still have Mocha [digg.com]
I don't buy the crowd control thing (Score:5, Interesting)
The real reason? Its bad enough when people are yapping on their phones constantly on the ground. Getting stuck on a plane near someone who won't shut up on the phone is MUCH MUCH worse due to the duration and the captive audience. For that reason I hope cell phones are never allowed (and if they are it should be a cell phone only section kept reasonable sound proof from the rest of the plane).
Re:funny, most inseatphones are not active. (Score:5, Interesting)
Also the only phones still avaliable on planes are run by ARINC and SITA, which both now have a picocell replacements under testing for installation this year.
There is no technical nor marketing reason you can't have a cell phone on board, if cell phones were a real danger then they would not be in carry on allowance anymore.
FAA is very conservative, and the FCC is a political body.
That is all
GSM network (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I don't buy the crowd control thing (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:I don't buy the crowd control thing (Score:5, Interesting)
I think it was Jet Blue that had the situation where passengers could see the news about their flight through satellite TV, something about damaged landing gear. I don't remember anything about a crew or passenger mutiny in the news reports.
Re:How about keeping some peace and quiet?? (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously, if that was really the reason then you'd have to ask why planes have reclining seats and music via headphones. Each of those is equally capable of being annoying.
TFA's "they don't want testing because testing costs money" argument doesn't stand up to scrutiny either. Just because planes could be allowed to tested for phone usage doesn't mean planes would have to allow phones to be used. It would be up to the plane manufacturers to decide to have their plane designed and tested for that "feature" and then up to the airlines if they wanted to pay the inevitable extra cost for such a plane, and then of course pass that on in extra cost to the passengers.
Re:I'm fine with the ban (Score:4, Interesting)
What *does* bug me the most about travelling on planes:
1. Fat people. No offense, but I feel like I have a right to my entire seat and 50% of the armrest. I don't mean to offend obese people, but if they cannot respect my rights to that space without elbows and legs brushing against me for the entire flight, they need to purchase a first class seat or two seats or something. No, it's *not* ok to plop yourself down and arrogantly and comfortably take up the entire both armrests on both sides of you. If you are fat, it's your fault. Period.
2. Smelly people.
3. People who aren't nice about travel needs (like having to get up to go to the bathroom, get up to walk around because you have a medical condition that requires you to), people who argue with flight attendants about stupid stuff ("No! I paid for this seat and I'm *not* moving" [even though an old woman really needs that seat])
4. People who aren't nice to you. I was once on a flight and after the lights were turned off in cruising altitude, I slowly put my seat back to go to sleep. A couple of minutes later, the guy behind me started pounding on the seat, probably trying to tell me to put my seat back in the upright position. He didn't bother to talk at all, didn't bother to get up and at least signal at me nicely if he didn't speak English, he didn't do anything. He just kept pounding on my seat for the entire flight, periodically.
5. People who rest their hands on the top of the seat in front of them, in a fashion that causes their fingers to touch the person's hair in front, and refuse to remove their hand.
6. People who look so antisocial and angry-faced and silent that you can't figure out if they have some terrorist plot behind their eyes. Cheerful people are much easier to be around.
7. People who think that a flight is the place to hit on girls.
Re:Rubbish (Score:3, Interesting)
If you are commenting about the fear of conflicts due to rude behavior, the AirFones are fine because no one uses them. I may have seen this phone used 1-2 times in the last 10 years. The fact is they are HUGELY expensive so people either don't use the service or use it for 2-3 minutes at most.
Now, compare that with a plane full of people with cell phones that have cheap plans where they can gab on for hours and, with power adapters, the phone can last the entire flight. Awful right? Even the nicest person would be hard-pressed to not start telling the person to hang the damn thing up.
I already see this on Amtrak between Boston and NYC. People gab loudly and for HOURS. Amtrak had to make a QUIET CAR because the amount of noise had gotten so awful due to impolite cell users.
Response from a Pilot (Score:5, Interesting)
Without further prefacing, here is my original post:
You mention in your article that "Many headsets used by private pilots come with jacks for using them with cell phones. The manufacturers say they're for use on the ground only. But many private pilots use them in the air without incident."
I fall into this category. However, I've also seen the dangers of airborne cell phone use. I carry a Nextel branded Blackberry. From my experience, it's not a very good phone to use on board an aircraft. About every 20 minutes or so, the phone goes into a signal frenzy. It's as if it finds multiple strong towers to connect to and is unable to choose. This results in a barrage of beeps and lights while it tries to figure out what's going on.
Furthermore, the risks of interference are very real. When I'm using the phone, I never notice the interference. I recently let someone else use my phone and was very surprised. My headset (flight radio headset) emitted a horrible scratching noise. I was totally unable to hear anything on the radio. I quickly looked at my VOR (radio navigation, NOT a gps) , and noticed that it was off coarse as well. Now, had I not been certain that I was on the right course, I might have well thought I was off course and corrected in an ultimately wrong direction.
I'm not sure if you're familiar with VOR technology, but it's the primary aviation navigational aid. GPS is wonderful, but it's still not the primary navigation mechanism. GPS is considered a "non-precision" navigation tool. VOR and ILS are still the primary mechanisms and they are dependent upon terrestrial radio transmissions. This is where the cellphone interference comes into play. Most cell phones operate in the 800mhz range. I'll save you a lesson in radio technology by simply stating that they can often have harmonic emissions in the same bands as used for aircraft navigation.
While you state that countless numbers of phones are left on during flights, this is not particularly dangerous. A phone ranging a tower is only actively transmitting for a very short period of time every 20 minutes or so at regular speeds. A phone that is in active use is a source of radio emissions that is in VERY close proximity to the aircraft communications and navigation antennas and is operating on a frequency that can have interfering harmonics. I have personal experience with the reactions a nav needle can have to a cellphone.
Imagine if the weather was bad (instrument meteorological conditions or IMC) and you were trying to land a large passenger airliner using nothing but a small needle on the panel to align with the runway. Then, a passenger starts talking to their uncle Bill about his bypass surgery and that needle jumps even 10 degrees off position. Now, instead of aligning with a runway, you're aligning with a corn field.
To answer your thoughts about shielding, that's not a viable solution. You would either have to shield the passenger cabin from radio emissions or shield the comm/nav antennas from it. In either case, the shielding to protect them from each other would seriously impair their usefulness. A passenger cabin shielded from RF emissions wouldn't allow your cell signal to get out, thereby negating the purpose. Shielding the comm/nav antennas sounds like a good idea until you realize that oftentimes nav aids and aircraft controllers a
Re:Author is an idiot; the carrier reason is valid (Score:3, Interesting)
Not quite (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I don't buy the crowd control thing (Score:5, Interesting)
Wifi on planes will be MUCH less of a problem in terms of annoyance to other passengers.
Unfortunately, the best solution is the one that is already in place on some planes - a public pay phone in the seat. It costs money to use, so people won't use it idly, but important business and personal calls that justify the cost can still be made.
Crowd control argument makes no sense (Score:5, Interesting)
It was actually pretty cool to hear the various airplanes yak with the tower. O'hare is a busy airport (to say the least), and it was astounding to listen to them juggle all the incoming planes. What was particularly funny was listening to them berate our pilot - the guy mumbled a bit, so the flight number kept getting cut off. The tower had to repeatedly ask him to repeat, and eventually they started making fun of him. Things like "well, this particular pilot doesn't feel he's important enough to respond to us". Tres droll.
Also cool was listening to the tower give directions (turn left, etc) and feel the plane immediately respond. All in all, it sounded pretty much exactly like it does on TV/movies. I'm sure if there were any actual flight emergencies, it would have been broadcast for the passengers to hear - unless there's some protocol to shut that channel down when things go amiss - which would just alert passengers to a problem anyway.
Re:I don't buy the crowd control thing (Score:5, Interesting)
IEEE Spectrum article with recent test data (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a good article for the layperson, I'd encourage reading it.
Interference is not an urban legend (Score:5, Interesting)
TFA says:
Real testing has been done. Unintended emissions from the phone have been identified as the culprit, not a deficiency in the navigation equipment. The aircraft's receivers are doing exactly what they are supposed to, responding to signals of certain frequencies arriving at the antenna. Once the phone pollutes the spectrum with spurious signals, nothing can protect the receiver. The shielding and filtering must be applied at the problem, which is the phone. Since the competitive consumer phone market demands the lowest possible cost, once a phone meets the minimum legal requirements they won't add another dime of product cost for further interference control.
Intereference does not occur every time, but when it does occur there has been a demonstrable cause and effect relationship. Start with this NASA case study [nasa.gov](long pdf warning).
Then consider this article from Spectrum [ieee.org]. On page 3:
And from page 4:
It's no conspiracy, and no urban lege
What I want... (Score:4, Interesting)
But, how much money could I make if I started a business that installed Faraday cages into movie theaters? Could I completely block all cell traffic with one? And could I install the cages relatively cheap and keep them invisible? See, I know there's been talk amongst movie theaters of using jammers to stop cell phone use. But the FCC is against that and it doesn't look like it's going to happen. But can the FCC stop me from constructing a faraday cage around my theater to 'ensure the highest degree of fidelity of the digital projection equipment, thereby ensuring the best viewing experience'?
I'll tell you what, if I know one theater in town has faraday cages and the others don't.. I'm goin to the one with the cages.
A lot of people argue that they need their cell phones during a movie in case of emergency situations. I think that's bullshit. For decades people managed to go to movie theaters without cell phones. They accepted there might be emergencies happening that they weren't aware of until after they left the theater. They accepted this because whenever an emergency happens and you are twenty minutes from the scene you are 99% of the time too late anyway.
Someone enlighten me here, what kind of emergency can you really expect to respond to fast enough to make a difference by racing out of a theater to the scene of the emergency? By the time you get there either the emergency is over or people who are supposed to handle that sort of thing (you know, EMT, Firefighters, professionals...) have already done so. But please, give me an example of how I could be wrong. I'm curious. There has to be something.
TLF
Re:funny (Score:5, Interesting)
In the U.S., Class A FM broadcasting stations are limited to a power of 6,000 watts at a maximum antenna height of 100m. Higher antennas are allowed if the power is reduced to compensate. [fcc.gov]At an antenna elevation of 600m, power must be reduced to only 150 watts (?!) to achieve the same distance coverage. Translate those figures to a cell phone with a rated power of no more than 3 watts, and you're talking about limiting power to 0.08 watt at 600m.
Of course, commercial aircraft fly a LOT higher than 600m!
The cellular network has far more subscribers than it has channels. To work, it depends on the ability to reuse a channel throughout the service area. If I place a phone call from my home 40km northwest of Nashville, the same channel can be reused in downtown Nashville, and on the city's west side, and in Donelson, and Brentwood, and Smyrna, etc., etc... My phone, about 1.2m off the ground, has a range of only about 6km.
If I place that call from an airplane flying 8,000m above my home, every base station in the greater Nashville area can receive my signals. Now, "my" channel cannot be reused at all.
If it were just me, that wouldn't be a problem. If it were, say, 10% of the passengers on each flight - well, I don't think it's hard to see how that could use up all available channels in a hurry. New channels aren't cheap. Nextel is paying to replace [2ghzrelocation.com]almost *all* the microwave remote broadcast equipment in use by U.S. TV stations, so they can free up some remote broadcast spectrum for use as cellular-telephone channels.
Here's an idea: allow calls from aircraft, but allow cellular providers to charge enough extra for airborne calls to cover their costs in adding more channels. I'll bet after the next billing cycle, the number of calls made from aircraft would plummet!
Mountians and tall buildings (Score:3, Interesting)
If this was a serious problem they would at least have signs telling us not to use our cell phones in high places. Even if they could not enforce it it would help.
Re:funny, most inseatphones are not active. (Score:2, Interesting)
That is the way I interpreted the fear of crowd control problems if calls are allowed during flight. cited in the summary. I assumed it was the fear of controlling the crowd of fellow passengers from bludgeoning blabbermouth fellow passengers to death.
Until there is a mechanism on each plane to jettison the bodies of cellphone users who have been thrashed to death by fellow passengers, I don't think the planes are ready. I can't see passengers having to endure long 9-12 hour flights with the bloody mess. And I certainly don't want to discourage anybody, anywhere, from smacking the viscera out of public cellphone blabbermouths.
What about TVs and GPSs? (Score:4, Interesting)
However, there's also a restriction on hand-held TVs/radios and GPSs, and I've always wondered why, since they're all receive-only. I don't see how it's possible for them to cause any interference (or at least no more interference than a laptop computer) since they're only picking up on signals that are already passing through the plane from an external source.
So, does anyone have any info on why those are banned as well?
I doubt it (Score:4, Interesting)
United often allows you to hear the flight deck communications.
Some airplanes still have in-plane phones using something similar to a cell network (with much bigger cells). So not all phones are banned.
If this was the real problem, these things would also have been banned, or never allowed but they are not.
The real reasons for banning phones are:
1) Paranoia by the FAA about malfunctioning devices (which is valid, BTW-- it doesn't usually cause a problem but I have seen radio intererence from many other devices that you wouldn't expect).
2) Concern by the FCC about the effect on ground-based cell systems. I.e. if you use your cell on a flight high above New York, how many cells are you reserving bandwidth on?
This article was largely typicall Slashdot incite....
TSA should therefore confiscate cell phones. (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually I'd like to see that. Confiscating a bunch of inexpensive water bottles in the name of security is a relatively benign way of maintaining the appearance of security. Being willing to risk massive public fallout by confiscating expensive cell phones would show they are actually serious.
Phones *can* cause interference with VHF radios (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not particularly loud, and I haven't had any trouble hearing ATC over it. On a commercial jet... with several hundred cell phones, and the much higher importance of ATC calls under IFR... I can see where it could be a major problem.
Are there ways to solve the problem? Sure. Is it really worth spending the resources to test and resolve in light of the social factors? I'd say no. I personally consider time spent on commercial flights as downtime. I don't want people to be able to get ahold of me, I want to read a book or watch a good movie.
If you really are important enough you HAVE to be in communication 24/7... well buy your own jet =)
Re:funny (Score:5, Interesting)
Calling bullshit... (Score:4, Interesting)
I fly on Air Force flights, which are not subject to FAA regulations, and the main problem with cell phones on airplanes is the fact that they DO NOT WORK. The transmitter in your phone is not powerful enough to reach more than say, 1000m. Your phone will go dead at less than 10,000 ft of elevation. Add this to the fact that cell towers are not powerful enough to reach the average cruising altitude of ~30,000 ft.
Fear of instrument interference was due to older, analog units with less defined spectrum. With ALL equipment in aircraft being shielded these days there is almost NO possibility of a disturbance in flight.
Besides, your 50mW transmitter is no match for, oh, the sun. And all the other background noise that is present in our atmosphere these days. I would bet that the electric motors on the landing gear ( or hydraulic pumps that may power them) put out more EMF in just about every frequency known to man than all the cell phones that might be in call at once.
Re:Counter from a Pilot (Score:2, Interesting)
I need to point out that VOR navigation has gone the way of the DoDo bird. I cannot imagine anyone in a modern aircraft spending the time to fiddle around with triangulating VOR's when the GPS is sitting there telling the pilot the current position within 10 meters, current groundspeed, and the exact distance to any point on the planet (within 10 meters). The nav radios are now used as a backup to the GPS, if at all. (Autopilots rely solely on GPS.)
I suppose one could make an argument that VOR's are useful in case the GPS fails, but I would retort that one would be much better off with a second redundant GPS on a separate power supply. Which system sounds more reliable: one based on a collection of a couple dozen satellites with no moving parts located *above* the aircraft where there is no weather or terrain and cannot be vandalized, or a system based on hundreds of rotating VHS radios scattered around on the ground, subject to weather, terrain, vandalism, and maintenance problems? Also, it is a simple and prudent matter to mount the GPS receiving antenna so that it is looking up and shielded from RF radiated from below. (A secondary receiver can be located below for extended inverted flight, if that is a concern.) GPS is in all ways better than VOR.
Secondly, the whole interference argument is moot. It doesn't matter. Out of the 137 passengers on a 737, how many of them have mobile phones? I'll guess 30%, or 41. How many of them actually turn their phones OFF when told to do so? I'll guess 50%, leaving 20 phones actively seeking cell towers for the duration of the flight. As far as interference goes, there is really very little difference between a handset trying to negotiate with a tower and one that is locked on and transmitting data. In fact, the device typically radiates more power when negotiating. The only way to prevent this situation is to be absolutely positive all the devices are OFF (including the ones in the baggage hold) -- an impossible task, or move the devices out of range of the towers (five miles UP) -- an inevitable task. So the solution is either impossible or inevitable, neither requiring any action on anyone's part.
Furthermore, radio communication is most critical during takeoff and approach. This is precisely when the devices onboard are the most active -- low altitude over populated areas, within range and transitioning cell tower coverage at a rapid clip. And guess what? Not a single significant incident reported. There have been anecdotal reports, but nothing more than mild curiosities.
This whole argument is a bunch of hooey. The airlines just want to figure out a way to monetize the connections, others want people to just shut the hell up and let them sleep, and the FAA is (as usual) in a state of paralysis. (This is usually a good thing.) The only thing I am pretty sure about is that it has nothing to do with radio interference.
However, if passengers did want, and were allowed, to use mobile phones openly (as opposed to furtively ;) ) in flight it would require a system to relay the signals to the network in a way that overcomes the problems of distance and speed. This will most likely (must be?) a small cell tower (picocell) located on the plane that relays the signals to a satellite link, then down to a central terrestrial hub. Once all the onboard devices discover the very nearby cell tower, they all back off to their lowest power settings and contently sit in low-power mode for the duration of the flight. Even if the picocell were not relaying the signals I think it is the only viable method to control the user devices. But this is a few hundred thousand dollars per aircraft to install, ongoing maintenance costs, and additional regulations and contracts. Not to mention media headaches when some tech blog points out that the airline is now bathing the passenger cabin with microwave RF. So it does not surprise me that this is happening slowly, but I am confident that within the next five
Re:funny, most inseatphones are not active. (Score:5, Interesting)
What do cellphones talk to? Cell towers. Where are those towers? EVERYWHERE, and they all operate at much higher power levels than any handset.
If there was some sort of danger, cell tower signals from the ground -particularly towers near airports where they are always A LOT of such towers- would be knocking planes out of the sky on an hourly basis from miles away. Every airliner in the sky flies over hundreds of these towers on every flight. It would be like the worst anti-aircraft fire ever devised.
But it doesn't happen.
And cell towers are hardly the most powerful transmitters in the wild. A cell tower throws out a couple watts. A TV transmitter can throw out a million watts and there are thousands of those towers too.
Aircraft operate happily amid a sea of RF and generally nothing goes wrong. So the idea that a wimpy little cell handset are threats are just overblown assumptions, unproven and unrealistic.
No, sidetone is *not* an effect of the copper loop (Score:2, Interesting)
In electronic phones, it's done slightly differently, but there is absolutely no reason it can't be done in cell phones, and it often is.
The explanation is correct in one respect, though. Increasing the sidetone will cause the talker to lower their voice.
Used to take phones apart for fun, have designed hybrid circuits.
Re:funny, most inseatphones are not active. (Score:3, Interesting)
Cell tower troubles (Score:3, Interesting)
Although the cell network concern is somewhat legitimate, the truth is it's a simple software problem of anticipating this kind of broad network access and handling it appropriately. It's not a serious technical challenge, it's just a limitation of SOME cell networks, for now. If the law changes, so will the software, so it can't be taken seriously.
There is also some legitimate technical concern of radiation affecting internal plane signals. However, this kind of interference is only possible on unshielded cable on the plane, which presents a problem whether a cell phone is on or not.
There are many reasons rumored (even by the FAA!) for the cell phone ban and the above are the only 2 with any technical basis, and even they just take a little more investigation to reveal their lack of merit. What was enjoyable was that the Senate debate didn't spend more than a few minutes pondering the technical concerns - they accepted them all as crap and moved directly to the nuisance issue, and focused primarily on that for the entire debate.
Re:funny (Score:1, Interesting)
Mod this guy up.
Seriously, folks, your life is not going to come to an end just because you can't jabber to your dullwitted "peeps" for an hour or two. You have no right to inflict said inane jabbering on those unfortunate enough to be stuck on the plane with you.
Now if only they could enforce a requirement that the other passengers bathe, and require that infants and small children travel as checked baggage, like pets....
Wrong: sidetone *is* an effect of the copper loop (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfortunately, the copper loop is a complex impedance and varies with line construction. There are various balance network options (e.g. TN12, etc) which try to approximate a 'best match' to the line, but they're not perfect. The end result is imperfect isolation across the hybrid - i.e. some microphone sound appears in the earpiece.
Oddly enough, it was found in the early days of telephony that this was in fact desirable; it made the phone sound more 'natural'. After all, when you speak normally some sound does reach your ears via the air - an effect which is reduced when you put a phone up to your ear. So, in fact, it's a happy accident that telephony hybrids are imperfect.
Mobile phones don't have this effect (separate transmit/receive frequencies or timeslots), and the electronic hybrid in some wired phones is too good at matching the line, so some mic sound is deliberately mixed back in to the earpiece audio to create sidetone. AFAIK, the only reason why this is less effective in mobiles phones is purely a power issue - the mixed audio is reduced to an absolute bare minimum in order to shave a few microamps/milliamps off power consumption, and so extend battery life.
(That's an overly simplified explanation - but, yes, I WAS a telephony engineer...)
FDMA, TDMA, CDMA, oh my! (Score:3, Interesting)
Only if you've got a first generation analog brick-phone using FDMA. Since G2, the handset/cell interaction has been digital (The cell network was always digital) using TDMA or CDMA.
TDMA on a moving target requires the handset ensure that the transmission occurs during its assigned timeslot. There is an acceptable amount of error built into the length of the guard interval between assigned timeslots. Violate the TMA assumptions of the code for calculating transmission timing significantly enough and the handset starts blabbing over into someone else's timeslot. Degradation of service occurs. This can be fixed by increasing the guard interval, but that reduces available bandwidth.
CDMA was created with the shortcomings of TDMA in mind and does not suffer from them for the most part. The "soft-handoff" the CDMA performs as a handset moves from cell-to-cell could present a problem for the handset if it transverses through many cells rapidly and simultaneously. How the network deals with a rapid string of handoffs is entirely up to the carrier. One carrier flogged "no connection charge for dropped calls" back in the day, kept the code around, and ended up with malicious users being able to get unbilled calls by forcing handoff back and forth between cells before the tab started. The same thing happens unintentionally if you fly across a city and are legitimately changing cells fast enough. Who knows what other weird implementation specific things happen... The problem isn't with the technology, though.
Reassuring air travellers are being "protected" (Score:1, Interesting)
Why the heck did my wife get her manicure set taken away before boarding the plane if the technology itself is susceptible to non-intentional interference. Bruce Schneier gets my vote for calling airline security since 9/11 what it is, "movie plot security".
will never work: Rayligh fading, Doppler effect (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:funny (Score:3, Interesting)
Cell phones don't try to talk to as many towers as they can. They generally have a relatively short list of towers that they are interested in at a time (active set). They may scan as many towers as they can hear at once, but then they'll only keep track of perhaps the top 3. Even then, they aren't in constant communication with them. Cell scanning doesn't require any involvement on the part of the tower itself. The tower will be generating a pilot signal. The pilot is sent at a known power level and uniquely identifies each cell tower. The phone will be scanning for these pilot signals and determining their signal quality based on the ones that it can receive/decode. During a call, a phone may be in communication with as many as 3 cell towers, and even then that's not terribly common.
You're going to have bigger problems with doppler at the plane speeds. But the most fundamental issue is going to be signal propagation.
Most modern cell towers are going to be using directional antennas. These antennas generally split a cell into 3 or more sectors. Each sector has its own antenna that dumps the majority of its power out directly in front of it with huge loss to signals along the (60, 300) degree range (i.e. to the side and behind). This is to reduce self interference with other cell towers behind the sector in question. It will also likely have significant loss to signals being emitted in an upwards direction, the direction that you would care about in a plane. This pretty much makes the question of whether or not the FAA will allow phones on planes moot. Who cares if they'll let you turn on your phone when you can't get a signal anyway?