I didn't think too much of that US journalist. Life is too short to be to campaign on such a trivial matter. Does it really matter that much? Can't he just sit there reading the in flight magazine for 15 minutes?
I'm not sure if you fully appreciate the scale of this. Americans take about 2 billion person-trips annually, Europeans about 800 million.
Let's just focus on the European segment. Including taxi, take-off and landing, that's typically 30 minutes per flight for which electronic devices are banned. So we're looking at 400 million person-hours per year. Not all of those person-hours would have been spent using electronic devices -- let's say we've stopped 5% of passengers on any given flight from doing what they want to do and forced them to do something else instead -- I think that's conservatively low. That's 20 million person-hours per year. For similar statistical purposes, the EU values working time at EUR 16/hour and leisure time at EUR 9/hr.
So overall, we're talking about an issue that costs Europe several hundred millions of Euro in time each year. Trivial matter?