Cell Phones To Be Allowed On UK Planes

Matty the Monkey writes "The British regulator in charge of air travel has approved cellphones for use on airline flights, reports the BBC. Airlines will be allowed to activate base stations in the plane's tail after takeoff, creating a zone of mobile coverage around the plane. 'The services could stop working once aircraft leave European airspace. Initially, only second generation networks will be offered but growing interest would mean that third generation, or 3G, services would follow later, said Ofcom. The cost of making a mobile phone call from a plane will be higher than making one from the ground.'"

Fist fights at 30,000 feet.

I once had the displeasure of sitting on a plane on the tarmac for two hours while our flight was delayed and the pilot allowed everyone to use their cell phones. It was torture as most folks were not talking on their cell phones to arrange transportation or take care of business, but they were talking (loudly) about everything and nothing and forcing those around them to have to listen! Even worse, people began trying to speak over one another and the volume gradually increased until there was an amazing din of people calling their friends to say "Hey! Hey! Betcha can't guess where I'm calling you from! An airplane! Ha ha ha ha, yeah and on my own cell phone even!". It was a horrible forced invasion of personal space and having to listen to someone blabber on and on "Like I know she does not like me because, like, she totally gave me a bitchy look yesterday and I was so like, peeved you know? because like, I think she is just so.... like not on top of it...... blah, blah, blah, blah, blah."

I am waiting for the smashed phones and fist fights to start happening in response to this.

Re:Fist fights at 30,000 feet.

Would you mind as much if this was only used for text messages and data plans for in-flight communications using a laptop? What if phones were forced into vibrate mode when they detected the picocell on the plane?

Re:Fist fights at 30,000 feet.

I wouldn't mind it in the slightest if it were limited to non-voice uses. What's to object to? But conversations would be justification for homicide.

Re:Fist fights at 30,000 feet.

It was a horrible forced invasion of personal space and having to listen to someone blabber on and on "Like I know she does not like me because, like, she totally gave me a bitchy look yesterday and I was so like, peeved you know? because like, I think she is just so.... like not on top of it...... blah, blah, blah, blah, blah."

When other people force me into their conversations in public, where I cannot really move away without significant inconvience, and the conversations are that inane, I generally join in. For instance, you could have said something like, "Oh, you know I hate when I get bitchy looks. You always know that... [I'm not going to continue, but if you talked for five minutes, they'll get off the phone." Alternatively, instead of talking for a long time, you could be uncouth; "She was probably bitchy because she was getting her period. After she's bled out her vagina for a few days, I'm sure she'll be fine."

The important thing is to entertain yourself as you interfer.

Re:

The passengers don't deserve to be fist-fought nearly as much as the assholes who approved the policy.

Re:Fist fights at 30,000 feet.

>I once had the displeasure of sitting on a plane on the tarmac for two hours....

It will be much worse when the plane is up and flying. Changes in pressure, plus the engine noise, are going to make hearing the tinny little speaker in mobile (since this is the UK) phones very difficult. And when hearing goes, shouting follows. Joy.

Re:Fist fights at 30,000 feet.

This is an opportunity! Bose makes that headset that cancels out engine noise pretty effectively. If somebody could make a headset that cancels out idiots on their cellphones, they would make a fortune. I say this jokingly but I am serious. I would buy one in a heartbeat.

Re:Fist fights at 30,000 feet.

I have the nice Bose headsets and while, yes... they do cancel out engine noise nicely, they are so well engineered that you can very easily hear voices and conversations sitting next to you or on the overhead PA. Believe me, I have elite frequent flyer status and fly enough to know that this policy is going to cause problems.

Re:Fist fights at 30,000 feet.

A headset that cancels out the idiots is easy - just make sure there's a high enough potential difference between the two earphones. The difficult part is persuading said idiots to wear it...

Re:Fist fights at 30,000 feet.

This whole problem of people talking loudly on a cell phone is due to a fundamental flaw in cell phone design. In the old-style AT&T wired phones, your voice was fed back to the handset receiver, so you could hear yourself when you're talking.

With cell phones, this doesn't happen, so you feel like you need to speak loud enough to hear yourself. Which is louder than a normal conversation because you're covering one ear.

Why cell phone manufacturers don't feed back your voice to the receiver, I don't know.

Re:Fist fights at 30,000 feet.

No, it wasn't.

Really? [wikipedia.org]

Re:Fist fights at 30,000 feet.

Death cannot come swiftly enough to those morons. I ride the bus every day and I get a full dose. Apparently some people don't see anything wrong with subjecting fellow passengers to an hour long conversation. There are 3 types of calls on the bus -

1. Incoming Call - Ring ring. Hello, Hi Larry, No, I'm on the bus, I'll call you when I get to the office. Bye.

2. Person gets on bus and calls - Hi, I just got on the bus, pick me up at the bus loop at 5, thanks bye.

3. Person gets on bus (ok, girl gets on bus) - talks loudly, same conversation as the one you quoted. "So she's all like get over it you know and I go like whatever and she goes.......blah de blah ..." for a solid hour.

Calls #1 & #2 - no problem, they don't bother me, the person is being considerate of others. Call #3, They'll find her corpse stuffed into a culvert somewhere, and the cause of demise will be suffocation due to a cell phone lodged in the trachea. Not that I'm angry or anything. As long as the jury members are over 30 I'll never be convicted either.

Sure, cel phones on a plane, what could possibly go wrong. /twitch.

Aaaargh

Sales of noise-cancelling headphones suddenly rise...

Earplugs... £0.15 a pair.

Wonderful invention. Buy them by the box.

 

Re:Earplugs... £0.15 a pair.

I'm self-centered because I'd like people to follow basic rules of public courtesy that have been customary since the beginning of time? No. I don't ask that people not talk on cell phones, just that they talk in the six-inch voices necessary for their phones to pick up the sound of their voices. Doing so doesn't affect in any way the ability of the speaker to have a conversation.

This isn't about unexpected sounds on airplanes (that was probably not well worded, sorry). This is about public spaces in general, and about any sounds that could be useful to hear. It could be on a plane or on a train trying to have a conversation of my own at reasonable volume. Face-to-face, cell, walkie-talkie, whatever. I actually don't fly much, but I ride the L (Chicago subway/elevated trains) pretty often; if I had earplugs in on the L I might miss a change-of-service announcement (sometimes when trains get bunched they'll have the lead train skip stops). And I'd certainly be less aware of people around me trying to board and depart crowded trains. Fortunately not very many people talk loudly on the L, and not many people wear earplugs, because a train full of people that couldn't hear anything would really suck.

I think it's great that someone is finally putting to rest the idea that cell phones will harm plane navigation systems, and is even working out a solution to make in-flight calls work. Go progress! Now why can't people progress (or even just not regress) in their ability to behave conscientiously? You know, take regard for the people around them? You calling me self-centered is fucking laughable.

just so long...

as the pilots aren't making calls while flying. I don't want the last thing I hear is "Gotta go, about to crash"

Security Double Standard

With all the paranoia at airports, you can't even get on a plane with a 120g tube of toothpaste. But somehow cellular phones are ok, even though we can supposedly crash the plane if we turn it on at the wrong time? Basically if there is a buck to be made, the authorities and airlines are surprisingly flexible.

But do you know why cell phones are not allowed?

The real reason why cell phones are banned on planes has nothing to do with their interference with a planes navigation system. Think about it - if there was even a minimal chance that a cell phone could cause a crash of a commercial jet, no one would be allowed to bring one on board. The FAA has tests and will fail any wire not shielded to withstand such interference.

The real reason is that cell phone networks are based on a 2 dimensional system. Cell towers grant leases based on which tower has the strongest signal from a particular phone. When the user of the phone moves from one tower's coverage to another, the lease is transferred. If a plane full of people flew over a metropolitan area with 150 cell phones negotiating leases, chaos ensues as the system is not designed to support a 3 dimensional model. Newer networks are but the older ones will be problematic. I highly suspect the British trial will have a special base on the plane which will take all the leases so the ground towers will not be affected.

The last reason is annoyance. I actually used Skype on planes from Vancouver to Frankfurt equipped with Boeing's Connexion internet service. While the trial ended, it was clear that using Skype on an overnight commercial flight could cause a great deal of annoyance to passengers wanting to sleep. ON local flights, it might be acceptable for a few sociopaths to talk the entire time thus ensuring their fellow passengers have full details of their personal lives.

I personally think that it will be less than two days before we see a newspaper article about a cleaning crew finding a passenger duct taped to the planes toilet with a cell phone shoved up his hind side.

Pilot Killing Waves

Wait, I'm so confused. I thought cell phones and other wireless devices emitted invisible pilot killing waves, so deadly that we must turn off all devices upon takeoff and landing, and put them into "pilot safe" mode when in flight?

I saw a documentary on it here:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/10/30 [penny-arcade.com]

Oh, I guess that frequency-hopping signals really aren't that bad.

Done with planes

I'm old enough to remember the Jet Set era. Air travel was so glamorous then. But now...

Phones. The latest in a series of moves designed to make traveling on a plane as excruciating as possible. Were I wearing a tinfoil hat I might even think it were a deliberate policy to discourage people from taking planes, in the name of terrorism or whatever this week's Reichstag fire is.

1. First there's the awful journey in a car and the cost of parking in the long-term carpark (slightly cheaper than buying your own plane). Or a similar fee in any taxi, should you decide to leave your car at home.
2. Next up is the confusing maze of finding your check-in point in a plastic ugly 60s monstrosity designed by the same blind architect who also does all the world's supermarket carparks.
3. Then you wait in line to check-in. Usually behind a Mongolian rugby team, who all have visa issues, and who all want to ask very, very detailed questions about their seats.
4. Then there's the security check. The hours of waiting, then the removing of shoes, belts, rings, laptops, false teeth, and god knows whatever else. This despite the fact that it's pretty easy to throttle a steward using the shoulder strap on your carry-on.
5. Then you have to hang around for hours in the departure lounge (you arrived 3 hours early to beat the lines at security). You fill the time by buying bad coffee which costs about the same as 100 gallons of avation fuel. Tastes like it too.
6. Then you get on the plane....

And now some fucker's gonna sit and phone for hours?

Screw planes, I'm going by boat. It's probably quicker.

Take it outside

I wouldn't mind idiots talking on their cell phones in-flight as long as they stepped outside to take the call.

Re:

>What if I use my cell phone and the plane is still on the ground?

from the summary....

>Airlines will be allowed to activate base stations in the plane's tail after takeoff...

Re:Can't we make calls now?

Ok, troll feeding, but apparently you didn't even bother reading your own link.

A. All but TWO of the calls came from cell phones. The rest were from Verizon Airfones that are mounted to the back of the middle seat that charge like $20/sec. (But ya know, if you're being hijacked, you make the damn call, charges be damned)

B. The plane was about 2,500 feet off the ground when the cell phones were able to connect and then were dropped shortly after as the plane, well, crashed. Abridging the last paragraph in the LINK YOU BLOODY GAVE.

So...yeah. Make a cell call from 30,000 feet and get back to us.

Re:9/11 anybody?

Yes, dammit, cellphones will work from an airplane. That is not the problem.

When your phone connects to a terminal, both the phone and the terminal measure the strength of each other's signal and they adjust their transmitting power to give a usable signal. That's why your battery charge doesn't last as long out in the country: your phone is transmitting at full power.

When you're at high altitude in an airplane, your phone will connect to a terminal that might be fifty or a hundred miles away, it will use full power to do that, and it will hit every other cell tower within that range. That loads the system down.

The system described in TFA puts a terminal right in the airplane, where your phone can communicate with it at minimum power. Then the signal goes over a reserved channel from the airplane to a dedicated ground terminal and into the main cell system, without fscking up everybody else on the same channel as your phone.

rj

Re:Mobile phone jammers

Sooner or later someone will mention phone jammers, and a few posts later someone will counter with the fact that it might block a doctors phone.

On an aeroplane? Why would a doctor, needing to receive calls, be on an aeroplane? If the doctor's likely to get calls regarding medical emergencies (I assume that's why you specified that profession) while he, or she, is on an aeroplane that's about to take off, or already in flight, I strongly suspect they wouldn't answer anyway.