Phone-y Airline Law

A few days ago, Airtel announced a tie-up with Aeromobile of the UK to offer in-flight connectivity on sectors outside India. Permission is apparently being sought from the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) to allow similar services in Indian airspace.
My request to the ministry of civil aviation would be to consider and correct the current rule regarding phones on flights, before giving this the go-ahead. The issue at hand is that telling passengers to "kindly switch off your mobile phones since they interfere with the navigation equipment on board" is a blatant lie and, as a matter of principle, citizens should not be lied to.
Let's not get into the details of technical studies done by aircraft manufacturers - you can find those online. Let's not even argue the fact that all "reported" incidents from actual flights only revealed 'mild correlation' and no evidence of 'causation'.
Let's just use plane (pun intended) logic. If there was even the slightest chance - even 1% - that a phone could actually disrupt on-board equipment, do you actually think you’d be let on board with one? Half the passengers just put their phones on silent and turn their screens off. If the airlines were really serious, they would confiscate your phone at security check and return it on landing, or they would install jammers on all flights.
Indian authorities have implemented these rules in accordance with 'international norms', which themselves took the lead from the US. The history of the rule in the US is that it was in fact the FCC, their communications regulator, who requested their airline regulator, the FAA, to ask customers to turn off their mobile phones.
This was because in the early days of cellular technology, the entire network could crash, if a number of phones went up in the air and switched too quickly from one cell site or tower to another. There was always the theoretical possibility that there could be on-board interference, even though all airline navigation equipment works in a completely different frequency range. With smarter networks and better electromagnetic shielding in cockpits, both reasons are now redundant.
25/05/09 Abhimanyu Radhakrishnan/Economic Times

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Categories: Indian Aviation- In General May 2009, Safety May 2009