Given this came up in a prior thread I guess it's been a foggy few weeks and maybe a few passengers have been for the first time (knowingly) exposed to full blown CAT 2/3 Autolands for the first time since rules were relaxed on PEDs. ...
1. The crews (in Europe at least) are not making this up.
2. It's what Denti said: There's nothing "going on" other than a risk assessment has been done by those cleverer than I. Interference with the avionics on a good weather CAT 1, probably hand flown approach/hand flown landing in relatively good visibility is considered acceptable, on a CAT2/3 autoland in the "clag" the risk of similar interference is rightly considered not so acceptable..
Background: As part of the general relaxation on rules regarding PEDs the "authority" (in our case the CAA/EASA) decreed that non approved PEDS ( which in reality probably means everything but the flight crews company issued and approved iPads, or similar) must be hard off for Low Vis approaches - in fact the requirement is been around for well over a year now. It's in our Ops Manual, that means it's legal requirement to have the things turned off, the announcements are also a legal requirement, so it's not just the crew messing around and/or making a song and dance for the sake of it. I'd guess most European airlines have similar.
So regardless of what anyone here thinks about the risks we're stuck with the rule, and TBH honest is it really that darned difficult to just go with the flow and just turn the ***** things off for 20 or so minutes?
FWIW as an example of the legislation from EASA:
https://www.easa.europa.eu/system/fi...-030-R%20).pdf
Table 1, "– Scenarios for permitting the use of PEDs by the operator", items 6 and 7 refer.