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Americans To FCC Chair: No Cell Calls On Planes, Please
jfruh writes "Who says Americans are politically apathetic? The FCC's proposal to allow cellular data — and, if the airline allows it, voice calls — on airplanes unleashed a flood of responses even before the official comment period began this week. The sentiment was overwhelmingly opposed to people talking on phones in flight. Some correspondents spun terrifying hypotheticals about yapping teens, some accused FCC chair Tom Wheeler of flying on private planes and being out of touch with the full-on horror of in-flight chatter, and one person concluded their letter with the word 'no' with letter 'o' repeated 213 times."
While I find the idea of being trapped next to someone making a phone call on a plane loathsome, the FCC really shouldn't be in the position of banning things just because they're annoying. If there's no technical/safety reason to ban the calls, allow them. The AIRLINES, on the other hand, really SHOULD ban these calls, and most have already said that they would.
Allow people to make phone calls while in-flight... However, they should be asked to step outside for the duration of their phone call.
Nice compromise, but seating space is already at cattle-car tightness now. I can only imagine what it would squeeze everyone down to if you had to accommodate a frickin' room with soundproofing.
Personally, and as a guy who travels on business a lot, I MUCH prefer that cell phone usage remain banned (data usage okay, but no cell usage).
Why? Two reasons:
1) people are annoying enough - imagine 100-200 of them in a tiny cabin practically yelling into their cell phones.
2) I love not having to answer emails or phone calls while in-flight.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
A night flight. The plane is quiet.
Suddenly,
"Yeah, I couldn't sleep... No, they've fed us.... HA HA HA HA HA!!! Yeah, that's right! HA HA HA HA HA!!! I know what you mean and there's that.... HA HA HA HA HA!!!! Do you remember that?... HA HA HA HA HA!!!"
Summation 2
" (data usage okay, but no cell usage)."
The FCC's job here is to create rules to promote safety. If it's an annoyance issue then the airlines should be the ones making rules about it. We don't need the FCC legislating cell phone use in movie theaters and cell phone use in planes can be dealt with the same way - anyone who won't stop talking on their phone in the theater/plane will be made to leave.
This is worse than apathy.
Americans are now wholly incapable of thinking for themselves. Instead of insisting that airlines provide the service they want, and voting with their money, they want to tell the government to force everyone to go along with those who shout the loudest. If there's no safety issue with cell phones, is it even the government's business? Most airlines will ban phone usage, except perhaps in business class or wherever else warranted. Some won't, and for those who can't cut the (totally nonexistent) cord they'll choose those airlines.
I find it hypocritical that anyone who believes in personal liberties should support the government regulating behavior they find annoying.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Nice idea, but it doesn't work.
I fly a fair amount.
The "noise" that noise-cancelling headphones cancel are sounds that have a consistent volume, like the constant drone (no pun intended) of the aircraft engines. The headphones do not cancel sounds like other people's conversations, at least not very well.
anyone who won't stop talking on their phone in the plane will be made to leave.
Now there's something we can all agree on!
Yup, frequent and sane fliers do. The rest of us who might fly once or twice in our lifetimes would prefer not to hear conference calls on that 12 hour day of flying.
Thankfully I have a shorter commute these days, but my last job involved an hour-and-a-half trip each direction on the train. The thing that bothered me most wasn't the time, the crowded trains, the hours i had to get up in the morning. No, it was the people yapping on their phones. Imagine a 5:50 AM commuter train with totally dead people half-asleep, then some idiot starts screaming into their phone and doesn't shut up for the entire trip. Now imagine that same scenario, but now you're inches away from that idiot crammed into a coach seat for a 14 hour flight to Japan. I fly a fair amount of these incredibly long trips for work, and I think I'd rather poke a hole in my eardrums with a sharp instrument than listen to 14 hours of inane banter or some exec screaming at his subordinate or assistant.
People just don't get that (a) you don't need to shout anymore, and (b) no one wants to hear about the divorce case you're working on, the colon polyp you had removed, your escapades out at the bar last night, your cat, your dog, your kids or any of the large number of conversations I've heard.
The other thing that's nice for the truly crazy business people I know (I'm not one of them) is that airplane time is dead time -- no one is sending you messages, no one can reach you, etc.
and i don't find them the least bit annoying.
i think it would be very similar for airplanes.
I've never tried to make a call but I have happily sent texts during a flight before. I can't say I paid much attention to it at the time, but I'm pretty sure I had a good bar or two of reception, at least whilst over land, so I'm guessing a call could have worked ok too. I'm sure the sitting-in-a-metal-tube thing won't help but presumably the windows allow enough RF to pass through.
Also, some of the passengers of 'flight 93' made calls to their loved ones during the 9/11 hijackings.
one person concluded their letter with the word 'no' with letter 'o' repeated 213 times.
Ah. The voice of reason.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Philosophically speaking, it doesn't make sense to ban people talking on the phone and not ban people talking to the person next to them. I've never heard anyone asking the FCC (or slightly more reasonably the FAA) to regulate the volume people can speak on the plane.
Practically speaking, people tend to speak more loudly when they are speaking on the phone. Normally, this is not necessary. Part of the problem is that unlike landlines (remember them?), you don't get the feedback in the earpiece of your own voice when you're speaking on a mobile phone. Psychologically, this creates a desire to "speak up". This could be helped immensely big changing the way the hardware works.
You could also require the use of some sort of external headset that provides feedback and eliminates background noise better than the existing phones.
Most importantly, educating people that they don't need to speak that loudly into mobile phones could go a long way. And not only on airplanes.
Cellphones on plane would be annoying, but as long as it's not dangerous, that's purely a business problem. The FCC shouldn't be getting involved with enforcing various people's aesthetics on others; that's not it's job.
Make those drop-down oxygen masks a little bigger, and they can double as CONES OF SILENCE. These will work especially well with the rumored iShoe phone
The FCC's job here is to create rules to promote safety.
No, the FCC's job here is to regulate the use of a limited public resource so that it remains productive and usable. The only "safety" feature of the FCC rules are the standards for RF emissions to protect people from injury from RF energy.
The current cell phone ban from the FCC has nothing to do with safety, it is a side effect of the existing regulation based on ITU treaties regarding the use of specific bands of of frequencies. The allocation for a major part of the cell phone frequencies is LAND mobile. That excludes use while airborne. A secondary justification is the design of hundreds of existing cell systems, which were designed with LAND mobile users as the intended target, so there are technical issues with simply changing the allocation to AIR mobile.
It is the FAA that is tasked with safety regulations for aviation. The vast majority of such regulation occurs as the direct result of an accident or incident, such as the FAAs new policies for medical certificates that forces anyone with a BMI of 40 or more to prove they DO NOT have sleep apnea. Too many pilots falling asleep at the wheel, something has to be done.
We don't need the FCC legislating cell phone use in movie theaters and cell phone use in planes can be dealt with the same way - anyone who won't stop talking on their phone in the theater/plane will be made to leave.
There is now precedent for "or shot". I'm still undecided if that is too severe or just the right deterrent.
> Wonder how much it would cost to retrofit every [airplane] with a sound-proofed 'room'.
I wonder how much it would cost to outfit that sound-proofed booth with a trap door floor?
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Allow cell phone calls on airplanes, but only from inside a soundproof booth in the back of the plane.
Mile-High Booth
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
If you're old enough, you might remember when airplanes had smoking and non-smoking sections separated by an imaginary barrier between two rows (restaurants used to do that too, it was like they thought there were little Maxwell's Demons whacking the smoke particles back as they tried to drift out of the smoking area). I can see the airline industry going in that direction with cell phones. Of course they'll charge extra for it, but I'm not sure if you'll have to pay more to sit there or not sit there.
But isn't this all moot? Unless you are using a satellite phone how exactly is a cell phone supposed to get a signal within a flying plane? I am no expert, but isn't the signals transmitted by ground based stations? I am not sure that they A) have the range, or B) are omni-directional (i.e up). Perhaps at low altitude close to a tower, or on the runway, but I am not sure how well cell technology is going to operate at 30,000ft over nothing.
http://www.911myths.com/html/mobiles_at_altitude.html
Seems to indicate that it may be possible, but likely not, and even if it was, impractical.
Wifi is an interesting idea, as it could be used for connectivity. Then again the connection that is used is a satellite one, which likely has some bandwidth restrictions, and is likely costly to operate beyond a certain point.
So for the most part this is a moot argument in the first place.
"If you complain to a flight attendant about a passenger that smells, they'll usually deal with it."
One has to ask... how? Do they hose the offending passenger down with Febreze?
The FCC's role in all of this should be is there a safety reason not to allow the phones on planes. The fact that it will be annoying and obnoxious should be left up to the market to decide. If some airlines offer cell free flights, and the public wants that, then those airlines will profit by increased ridership. If not, then their competitors will benefit. Not every problem needs to be solved by the government.
Getting up in arms about cell phones on planes is all fine and good. Frankly, however, I'd rather see people be getting upset about the net neutrality ruling and demanding the FCC appeal the outcome. That will have a greater long term impact than conversations on planes.