FCC Kills Plan To Allow Mobile Phone Conversations On Flights (pcworld.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PCWorld: On Monday, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission killed a plan to allow mobile phone calls during commercial airline flights. Since 2013, the FCC and the Federal Aviation Administration have considered allowing airline passengers to talk on the phones during flights, although the FAA also proposed rules requiring airlines to give passengers notice if they planned to allow phone calls. The plan to allow mobile phone calls on flights drew sharp objections from some passengers and flight attendants who had visions of dozens of passengers trying to talk over each other for entire flights. But FCC Chairman Ajit Pai on Monday killed his agency's 2013 proceeding that sought to relax rules governing the use of mobile phones on airplanes. Under the FCC proposal, airlines would have decided if they allowed mobile phone conversations during flights.

Comments

Re:only a damned plane ride

[bobbied]

There is actually a security reason for this. Using a cell phone to trigger an explosive device is a common tactic in the middle east. Delivering cell calls handsets on a flight allows a remotely triggered device to be improvised, planted and triggered from thousands of miles away. It would also allow the tracking of a specific flight/person for similar targeting from the ground. All this is possible with obscurity built in.

If you have to register your WiFi device to use it and receive data, that makes most of this kind of thing go away, or at least makes it necessary to have somebody on board to sacrifice themselves to the cause (not that this eliminates the threat, but it sure makes the commitment level higher to follow though).