Airplane mode in electronics?

[Loose rivets]

The short film is interesting, if a bit long-winded. Good science going on.


BBC News - Fast Track - Can gadgets be safely used during take-off and landing?

[PLovett]

Ah..........loose, you beat me to it. Rather interesting report actually but the professor, I thought, got it absolutely spot on when he said that it would be better for all devices to be off for the takeoff and landing so that people may have at least one less distraction from listening to the cc briefing.

[bookworm]

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?

[PLovett]

Aw come on bookworm, you know the only thing that all those passengers would be prevented from doing is updating their facebook page.

[Dg800]

I wonder if he walks into lamp posts 'coz he's too busy Tweeting...

If he did, he'd then probably sue the City Council for placing them in his path... Bloody entitlement culture.