I’ve complained before about the regulations with electronics and flight. I’d heard that there is some testing in the works for Kindle devices and was wondering if maybe they were considering lightening up on it.

Not United, though, that’s for sure. In fact, they’ve changed up their pre-flight lecture routine to… clarify… how serious they are about this. They repeat like fifty times that “off means off (and not Airplane Mode)” and have added rather than subtracted to the rules: no cell phones on – even in Airplane Mode – at any point in the flight.

As someone who uses their phone for a host of purposes, this is lame.

It’s also rather counterproductive. Presumably, they make a special case against phones for fear that people won’t actually turn the radios off. But the same can be said for tablets, which are allowed. Or computers, which are allowed.

A lot of this goes to what I think is the impossibility of drafting any sort of rules on this with any consistency.

It’s not unlike a large software company that I used to work for. They prohibited Pocket PCs for security reasons. But they allowed smartphones for productivity reasons. At the time, a smartphone was a Pocket PC with voice/data capabilities and a camera.

Due to ongoing sleep deficits, the inability to use (certain) electronics did not really turn out to be an issue this time. I was usually asleep during take-off and landing did not take long enough for boredom to set in before I could turn my cell back on.