As newer airplanes are better shielded and old ones are taken out of service, the number of reported incidents have dropped in recent years down to 1-2 per year, which isn't much given the massive increase in PEDs and number of flights.

The report that the FAA published actually has a lot of interesting info about this: http://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/ped/media/ped_arc_final...

Wouldn't that imply a worldwide, secret pilot conspiracy, especially with incidents where the pilot has been able to reproduce the interference by asking the passengers to turn the device back on?

It's certainly very unlikely that an iPod will cause any problems. That doesn't mean it's physically impossible, as many people seem to think. Which is why I recommend reading the FAA report, which goes into a lot of detail on exactly what considerations they've taken, the risk analysis and why they are changing the rules now.

No, it would only require similar delusions. That happens all the time.

Every time this comes up, somebody's got to get snooty about Kids These Days and Their Attention Spans and Facebooks and Pokeymans.

All I really want to do is read a book during takeoff and landing. Reading is still a thing mature, responsible people do, right? Thanks to ever-decreasing passenger and storage space, it can be a genuine pain to fit even a mid-size paperback into my carry-on luggage in such a way that it's easily accessible during flight, especially for big, tall folks like me. It's much easier all around if I can read a book on my phone, which I have to have with me anyway; or, for some people, a slim tablet or e-reader is an easier fit.

But no, I can't do that (yet). I have to either cram a book in there somewhere, or spend 20+ minutes with nothing to distract me from the heat and the cramps and the screaming babies but vapid seat-back magazines. I know it's not the end of the world, but it's one more frustration piled on top of an already deeply frustrating and dehumanizing experience. After paying hundreds of dollars for the privilege of getting treated like a criminal suspect and then packed into a can like a sardine, it's not unreasonable to keenly desire a little bit of comfort and distraction, is it?

Yes, which is why we're getting rid of it now.

The rationale was that when you're playing on your device, you're paying less attention to the crew and what's around you, which can be problematic in case something bad happens and you need to react.

EDIT: I'm just the messenger, guys ;)

Conveniently forgetting that they have a live update of your exact position from NORAD/FAA/etc...

Older networks were designed around the fairly reasonable assumption that a cell phone would only ever be able to talk to adjacent cells, because anything farther away would be over the horizon. So you might be able to talk to both A and B at the same time, but you couldn't talk to C without first losing contact with A.

Raise the phone a few thousand feet in the air and this assumption goes out the window, confusing the network. There's an amusing story of a pilot who called up his family to let them know he was almost home and ended up getting billed for the call (at expensive 80s rates) a bunch of times because several different towers all thought they were running the call.

There's certainly no problem today, anyway.

That can't possibly be true. Spectrum re-use in distant sites could in theory have some effect on the call but differences in signal strength would make significant effects unlikely.

Also, that story about the pilot must also be apocryphal. A handover is a handover, and there is only one "winning" decision. Not to mention that CDRs don't work that way.

Lots of civil aviation pilots use mobile devices in the air without problems for the user or network.

I know that lots of pilots use mobile devices now, but we're talking ~30 years ago.

It's likely due to attentiveness should you need to evac

Which is perfectly fine with me.