A pilot has revealed the shocking truth about placing your phone in airplane mode – and obliging by this rule isn’t as critical as you might think.
We’re all well-versed in the routine: board the plane, plug in your seatbelt and then switch on the flight-safe mode on all handheld devices. But just how important is it?
Not very, according to airline pilot, US Army veteran and TikToker @PerchPoint.
‘If you forget to put your phone on airplane mode, no, it’s not the end of the world, the plane will not fall out of the sky and it won’t even mess with the systems on board,’ he told his 13.2K followers in one video.
But what it does have the potential to mess with is the headsets – which phones not placed in flight-safe mode can interfere with, creating a buzzing sound.
‘If you have an aircraft with 70, 80, 150 people on board, and even three or four people’s phones start to try to make a connection to a radio tower for an incoming phone call, it sends out radio waves,’ the pilot explains.
‘There’s the potential that those radio waves can interfere with the radio waves of the headset that the pilots are using.’
He went on to recall a recent flight from San Francisco, where they’d ‘pushed out the gate, [were] talking to the rampers, and started the engines.’
Once they’d turned around the plane and started to head towards the taxiways, he called up air traffic control to get clearance and was met with a loud buzzing noise that meant he could barely hear the directions he was being given.
‘It kinda sounded like a mosquito in my ear,’ he explained.
‘Like I said, it’s definitely not the end of the world but it’s pretty annoying when you’re trying to copy down instructions and it sounds like there’s a wasp or something flying around.’
‘So if you’re ever curious why you’ve got to put on airplane mode, that’s why.’
As a flight attendant, I think this plane habit should be ‘illegal’
Cher Killough has been a flight attendant for the past five years, so has seen her fair share of nuisance travellers.
But there’s one pet peeve that ticks her off most; a habit that men in particular should take note to avoid.
In a TikTok video, the Dallas-based airline worker shared a list of things she believes ‘should be illegal to do’ on a plane.
Number one was manspreading, or more specifically, ‘manspreading when you’re in a middle seat.’
If you haven’t heard the term before, it refers to when people (normally inconsiderate men) sit with their knees so far apart that they take up more space than their seat allows, encroaching on people either side
‘I’ve been a passenger, and had it numerous times, where men will spread their knees all the way into my seat section or the person’s on the other side’ said Cher. ‘It’s just unacceptable.’
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