Anonymous wrote:Engineer here. You should shut off or use airplane mode. Otherwise, your phone is going to constantly try to ping cellphone towers as you fly by them at 500mph and that's a huge battery drain (when doing an initial ping, it uses more battery power then once a connection is established).
There's also the being a good citizen part of it -- the cell towers can get a little overloaded when a phone is moving that quickly between towers, affecting the service of those on the ground.
As for the part about cellphones complicated the airplane's avionics, that's pretty much a myth. Otherwise, we'd hear of terrorists showing up with 20 cellphones in their bag, threatening to turn them all on at once.
This. Though I will say, as a pilot, I make sure I'm in airplane mode when it looks like we'll be flying an approach to minimums. Hey, no one said we have to be logical ALL the time!