IS SWITCHING TO AIRPLANE MODE REALLY NECESSARY DURING FLIGHTS??

Ever been annoyed by the air hostess or flight attendant to switch off your phone or put in airplane mode??? Have you ever wandered about the reason?? if YES,then this is the right place for your answers.

 Sometimes when we need to fast charge our devices or smartphones and do not want to switch it off we take the use of airplane mode. But only some of us know the use of this multi-usable mode called by many names like aeroplane mode,flight mode, standalone mode etc which is present as setting in most most of today's electronic devices. 

Before the takeoff, the flight attendants inform us that we should turn our phones, tablets, laptops and other signal generating devices to airplane mode.

Most of us feel that this is a waste of time and achieves nothing. It has nothing to do with the flight or in anyways related to it. It is just a step of the practice manual to be followed foolishly. But as we will know form the post further that it helps the pilots in safer take-offs and landings and helps them to concentrate.

So what does really happen? Let’s find out!!

It will not cause a crash for sure, neither they will take an action against you if that’s the thing you wanted to know.the airplane what basically does is that it cuts off all electrical or magnetic transmissions  to or from the device. So that means all the inbuilt devices like antenna , bluetooth ,wifi or any microdevices that uses radio-frequency signal transmission to communicate are turned off and are not able to function properly. And therefore there is no signal interference to the cockpit radio or the flight antennas which are of utmost importance to the pilots during landings and takeoffs.

The safety concern is that when we are more than 10000 feet above ground surface, the signal of our devices bounce off multiple towers and then it send a strong signal. It may cause a network congestion on the ground. A radio emission can sometimes be very strong (Raising up to 8W) which may cause annoying sound for air traffic controllers. This sound is caused due to the parasitic demodulation. Due to these sounds it may also happen that the staff miss an important radio call from the controllers.These sounds are something like the sound that we can hear from the speaker when a smartphone is around it. A slow, percussive thumping. These are not critical as per safety perspective but are annoying for sure.

The name comes from the prohibition by most of the airline companies restrictions of not using equipment , transmitting radio-frequency signals while landing or during takeoffs.

It should also be noted that if higher number of people on-board do not switch on airplane mode it may also cause “RADIO POLLUTION”.

No evidences till date have confirmed electronic devices to have caused a plane to malfunction and deviate or even crash.

But it is advisable that next time when you are flying, you should follow the rules on board.

For more reference please visit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airplane_mode
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204234