What happens if you don’t put your phone in airplane mode? - Lindsay DeMarchi

To be honest, I think telling people that it's not about their safety but being basically just nice to random other people...will probably lead to 50% less people turning on air plane mode.

My wireless communications professor explained this exact same thing to us many years ago! He said that the reason we are asked to put our phone on airplane mode is not because it will interfere with the airplane's communications but rather our phones will overwhelm and potentially take down the entire cellular network on ground because they will suddenly see so many cell towers in clear line of sight at take off (as there will be no obstructions) and bombard the network with so much signals that it can get overwhelmed. This makes sense because airplanes use a much lower frequency to communicate with the control towers, somewhere in the low 100 MHz range whereas cell signals are in GHz range. I guess it's easier to scare people into thinking that using the cellphones can harm the flight they are taking rather than make it difficult for people on the ground to call each other. This is the biggest lie that is told to passengers it's hilarious!

In radio astronomy, NOTHING is more annoying than someone forgetting to turn their phone off around the telescope and then us basically getting the signal version of gibberish. 😂 It was so cool to see a video discuss about the effects on astronomy though. It is rarely talked about, especially in the radio spectrum.

I always thought that if cellphones are truly dangerous for planes, they would be banned from the cabin outright. Aviation take safety seriously, and I don’t think they’ll risk a plane’s safety on the willingness of passengers to be inconvenienced.

So what I'm hearing is airplane mode won't turn your phone into a plane...

My friend who is a private pilot told me that putting my phone on airplane mode was simply because above 3000 ft, I wouldn't be getting any service and my phone's battery would just drain really quick as it spends the length of our flights searching for a signal since our little Cessna 182 didn't have a wifi signal built in for my phone to link to.

I think it'd be important to note that this was not the only (or at least original) effect of phones / airplane mode (and I'd imagine it came about due to interference with equipment and those stations, not cell towers and their stations on the ground) and it does/did actually inconvenience the pilot as well--or at least it used to. I think most of the systems that rely directly or indirectly on those specific radio waves have been phased out in favor of GPS in most cases or use different wavelengths, etc. There was a point where the wavelength used by phones and the equipment on planes (I think it was specifically older ADFs) were the same. I'm a pilot by the way so I'm pretty sure I'm not bullshitting, it's just not really a problem anymore.

I love how you connected this story to astronomy and science. Very important that people understand.

The pilot personally crashes the plane out of spite

Finally! I was wondering what the answer to this question was lmao cause all they say is put it in airplane mode and never explain why

I use this feature everyday to save phone battery One of the best tricks I've heard so far

On one flight i accidentally left airplane mode off. The phone actually did manage to connect at least twice to cell service and received "Welcome to " SMS-messages. I was both surprised and impressed it managed to do that!

A moving train acts as a 'military jammer' as well. I experience the slowness/disconnect of the network for a few minutes multiple times in a day, whenever a train passes by.

I fly a lot and had no idea this was what airplane mode was about. I thought it was something to do with the instruments the pilot used for the flight. I honestly don't use airplane mode much, because there was no perceivable difference between when I used it and when I didn't. But now that I know why it exists, I'm going to start using it much more in the future.

1:33 Calls are not relayed wirelessly between cell phones via towers. Cell towers are connected to a wired network that handles routing etc. Cell phones connect wirelessly to a cell tower, but in between the cell tower of the caller and recipient is a wired network. Although in rural areas, it is possible that the cell phone connects to a tower that is not directly connected to the network. In that case the tower could relay the signal to another tower that is connected to the network. A call will always pass by a wired network

What an excellent and informative video, I've always wondered about this. The only caveat is that cell towers don't only assign "colors" to individual phones. That was just a metaphor to get to the more interesting bits, but really all the different ways we've figured out how to multiplex phone signals is fascinating in its own right, and would make for a great video. Plus I'm sure a ton of people would be interested in and usefully informed by "what's the difference between 3G, 4G, and 5G anyway?"

"I do not think that the radio waves I have discovered will have any practical application." Bro can't just take the compliment

It's really amazing how strong waves can a cellphone generate using so little energy that it can do it for hours using only a simple battery and not plugged at the wall and draining huge amount of energy from the power grid.

I think the idea that cellphones interfere with an airplane's navigation instruments is a relic of the time when people started using videocameras on airplanes, back in the 1980s and 1990s. As a flight instructor, I once tried to have a friend film an instrument approach from the back seat. The old analog nav radios were ok while we were being vectored around but they went nuts when we tried to fly the ILS (instrument landing system). Those days are long gone (as are giant, badly shielded videocameras that record on vhs tape), but it took the FAA a very long time to start looking into which radio devices interfered with aircraft systems. It just seems like the safety announcements on commercial flights ought to tell people why they should turn on airplane mode. More people would probably comply (or at least they would know why the rest of us were glaring at them.

The plane instantly does a 90° turn and we all plummet to our deaths. Trust me it happened to my uncle. He works at Nintendo.