Kindles at Takeoff and Landing

As a frequent flier I saw a point in Joshua Fruhlinger's article E-Books, I'll Miss You that made me pause. In the article he listed reasons why he would miss his e-reader and why he was going back to regular book reading. It wasn't a convincing article, but this grabbed me:

It's not really the Kindle's fault, but we couldn't be together when I needed it most: The moments on a flight just before takeoff and landing. It's then that I'm most anxious or most bored (the in-flight entertainment goes off around this time, too). The FAA was uncomfortable with our relationship and callously stood in the way.

Like I said, it wasn't convincing, particularly when he wrote he hated the battery life limits of his Kindle . . . preposterous.

This past weekend there was this article Do Our Gadgets Really Threaten Planes by  Daniel Simons and Christopher F. Chabris. There answer . . . No.

I've read this many times before and have heard rumors, but had never seen it so brazenly spelled out. Why don't the airlines just admit that there is no problem or danger? Nothing is worse than sitting in the terminal or on a long flight reading and having to shut the ole Kindle off for takeoff and landing.

I suppose the thought now is that they don't want passengers to have laptops et al out, on their laps, cluttering the aisles in case of an emergency. But what if I have a hardcopy of Lonesome Dove on my lap? That's about as big as some laptops. Why can't I have my iPhone out with Airplane Mode on.

The part of the article that I thought was the most resounding was this:


To gather some empirical evidence on this question, we recently conducted an online survey of 492 American adults who have flown in the past year. In this sample, 40% said they did not turn their phones off completely during takeoff and landing on their most recent flight; more than 7% left their phones on, with the Wi-Fi and cellular communications functions active. And 2% pulled a full Baldwin, actively using their phones when they weren't supposed to. 

Consider what these numbers imply. The odds that all 78 of the passengers who travel on an average-size U.S. domestic flight have properly turned off their phones are infinitesimal: less than one in 100 quadrillion, by our rough calculation. If personal electronics are really as dangerous as the FAA rules suggest, navigation and communication would be disrupted every day on domestic flights. But we don't see that.