Not in the US, where it applies throughout the flight.
And at least in Europe, the ban is due to the risk of distraction/disorientation in case of an emergency, in my experience.
> the plane is essentially a Faraday cage at altitude, and a phone has almost zero chance of connecting to a tower
Counterpoint: I have a whole collection of “welcome to <place>, your roaming charges will be <exorbitant>” text messages on my phone from countries I’ve only ever overflown at 30k feet.
This is from flights that do permit in-flight phone usage, but I believe my network has no roaming agreement with the microcell operator, so it keeps scanning and sometimes catches a bidirectional link to some long-range tower. (They’re specifically optimized for that in the North Sea and Atlantic for fishing boats, as far as I know, so for regular modern towers it’s probably less likely, but that separation hasn’t always existed.)
Supporting your counterpoint: I am a cell tower geek and I have an app on my phone that records the cell ID of every tower my phone attaches to. I once flew from Wellington to Auckland on an Airbus 320 and forgot to turn off Airplane mode. Arrived into Auckland and my app had logs around a hundred or so cells my phone managed to attach to. So it can happen. I've also had successful two-way text conversations while still in the air but low enough (e.g. when descending on approach to an airport). Saying a plane is a Faraday cage is a bit extreme but I do acknowledge the steel tubing around you will reduce the signal strength by quite a bit -- but not quite enough to 100% block out the signal it seems.
Not in the US, where it applies throughout the flight.
And at least in Europe, the ban is due to the risk of distraction/disorientation in case of an emergency, in my experience.
> the plane is essentially a Faraday cage at altitude, and a phone has almost zero chance of connecting to a tower
Counterpoint: I have a whole collection of “welcome to <place>, your roaming charges will be <exorbitant>” text messages on my phone from countries I’ve only ever overflown at 30k feet.
This is from flights that do permit in-flight phone usage, but I believe my network has no roaming agreement with the microcell operator, so it keeps scanning and sometimes catches a bidirectional link to some long-range tower. (They’re specifically optimized for that in the North Sea and Atlantic for fishing boats, as far as I know, so for regular modern towers it’s probably less likely, but that separation hasn’t always existed.)