Don't Even Think About It

Column originally published April 5, 2007

Cell-phone ban may save lives

By Kelvin Wade

Now, I'm not a frequent flyer but I can imagine how much of a hassle airline travel can be these days. A friend of mine, a white woman in her mid-fifties, is frequently picked out of line and treated like a teenaged black man driving an expensive car. Then there are the arbitrary rules of what you can and can't bring aboard a plane.

There are delays and canceled flights. There are long slow-moving lines. There's that knot in the pit of your stomach when three young men of Arab extraction sit across the aisle from you on your cross-country flight. (Hey, you think it. I said it.)

There are those airline seats that don't quite measure up to the average American's girth these days. There's the possibility someone with ample backside like me will occupy the seat next to you. Or there's the chance someone will have a noisy baby on the flight. Or the guy across the aisle could have B.O., gas or a bad cold.

The flight could hit turbulence and make even the most seasoned traveler white-knuckle it to their destination.

With all of the things that can conspire to make your flight more stressful than it needs to be, the Federal Communications Commission did something that will make flights more bearable. On Tuesday, the FCC decided that it would keep a rule in place requiring cell phones to be kept off during flights.

No, it doesn't have anything to do with the avionics of the airplanes. If there was a way your handheld device could send 70 tons of steel, fuel and passengers to a horrific end, you'd never be allowed to take it on the plane.

The official reason is that the cell phones could interfere with other cell signals and jam cell networks on the ground. The cell phone industry isn't enthused about cell phone use on planes for that reason.

But that's not the most important reason in my view. Cell phones on planes would lead to homicide on planes. Just imagine getting on a coast-to-coast flight and some dweeb sits next to you and flips open his phone and starts gabbing to his best friend about such weighty topics as Anna Nicole Smith's remains, Sanjaya Malakar's singing or what Paris Hilton is up to.

Multiply this guy by a dozen people all blabbing loudly on their phones. Imagine the frat boy next to you shouting into his phone, "Dude, like I'm totally over Denver now."

Its bad enough we have to put up with brain dead, frequently foul-mouthed conversations in the grocery store and in department stores. But we also have to put up with the clueless folks who forget to turn off their phones in theaters, libraries and churches. We put up with the motor mouth driver on his cell phone driving either like he's driving Miss Daisy or he's Dale Earnhardt Jr.

The airline industry is considering wireless internet access on planes. That's fine. I'll take the tapping of keys over conversations worthy of a Seinfeld episode.

A significant source of air rage has been averted. So the next time you're going through the hassle of flying, keep in mind that without that FCC ruling, it could be a lot worse.