this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
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You should still set airplane mode when airborne for other reasons besides interference with the aircraft. For one, you'll save your battery. It takes a lot of "juice" for your device to search for cell towers that are likely out of reach. You may also want to avoid connecting to a tower outside where you have coverage. E.g. for a flight from Anchorage to Minneapolis, maybe you don't want to connect to Canadian cell towers and potentially receive charges in another country. Obviously this depends on your plan limits. But, yeah, it's not really about protecting the airplane, in most cases
Here is a video from TED-Ed that explains why. TLDR: phones looking for a signal broadcast on high power, but planes move so fast that you can end up right next to a cell tower so the high power signal can interfere with other phones trying to communicate.
https://youtu.be/iKYHf22qVdM
I disagree with how he phrases a few things, but I think it's mostly accurate.
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Most flights I've been on had outlets and/or USB for charging, I've been leaving airplane mode off for every flight for years now
Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure battery drain is about normal anyways when I don't plug it in, the radio must eventually switch to a lower power lower search frequency at some point. Either that or the tower searching drains your battery thing is about as overblown as the leaving GPS on thing
I turn on airplane mode whenever I am already connected to wifi
I thought another reason was to avoid blasting everyone* you pass with your phone's maximum power signal while trying to reconnect.
Edit: the problem being interference, not any health effects. I read that the effectively one-way signals from the sky worked somewhat like a jammer.
Cell phone radiation is negligible
I don't think even the combined power of all the phones in the plane would be enough to cause interference for anyone
The phone's modem is not powerful enough, it takes a couple watts at most, which is tiiny compared to what a cell tower can output