the truth behind airplane mode

taha back for his annual video

“I look like this, and that means being your best behavior when you get on a flight” 💀

The main reason you should turn on airplane mode is that once you're above 10,000ft, you'll have effectively zero signal anyway, and your phone will start busting its ass looking for one which drains the battery faster than usual.

My first thought was "of course I need that, how else do I play mobile games?"

As cabin crew, it really doesn't make a difference, we tell people to put planes on airplane mode mostly so people pay more attention to PA's and our instructions, also it saves your phone battery. I've had a couple of times where I've left airplane mode off accidentally and it drains battery SO fast

See what I was always told was that leaving airplane mode off will just absolutely kill your battery because your phone is using so much electricity just screaming for a tower

If you look at the current FAA regulation about airplane mode it basically says “enforce this because the FCC said to.” It has absolutely nothing to do with airplane safety and is completely because the FCC is worried about the impact on the cell network

Level 2 tech support agent at a mobile carrier here. It is still a really good tool for trying to re-establish the best connection to a nearby tower without powering your phone off and on entirely if you're in a weaker coverage area, and it's also great for testing technologies such as Wi-Fi Calling by making sure those calls aren't actually going over the cellular network. There's a few other cases too, such as when we update settings on your phone line internally and need you to force a reconnect that way to see if it corrected the issue. Troubleshooting could absolutely still be done without it, but having this setting on phones does make things quite a bit easier.

the most wild thing about this video is that at some point a small simple calculator was $345. and this isn't even accounting for inflation. i wonder how much those $345 would be today

Ex Flight Attendant here and let me tell you this even the crew (pilots included) have forgotten to put their devices on Flight/Airplane mode ! its NOT a big deal with modern aircraft and modern devices. The issue with Aviation is that new rules and regulations can be put into place very fast but they take MUCH longer to be undone even if technology has moved on. The same is true about LAGS (Liquid Aerosols and Gels) and the restrictions around these post 9/11 there have been scanners that are able to reliably and accurately identify dangerous substances in liquids for years but the rules are only changing now (and it will be very slow to be widely deployed).

We truly need airplane mode so that we can throw our phone and watch it fly

I was just gonna shout out the animation in the video but then I see Sabrina’s name in the credits?? So yeah shoutout for the great animation but also pls rest, you’re a workaholic

"clean my mac is safe, I promise" yeah, they have a really sketchy history and it's wild that they have to reassure people now

Taha flipping between router (router) and router (rooter) during the Wifi section is triggering a problem I didn't know I had.

12:30am is my favourite upload time for uk viewers

I was once asked by a flight attendant to turn of my tamagochi, which, if you've ever had one, you'll know you can't do short of removing the battery. I don't remember if I said anything out loud, but I remember smugly thinking "well I can't do do that but I'll pause it if it makes you happy"

would you believe me if I told you that when taha said "i definetely put my phone on airplane mode cause I look like this" my first thought was "a nerd! of course you turn on airplane mode" ?

Not to mention roaming uses a TON of battery and so it would probably be a bad idea to connect to conventional cellular from the air anyway. Also, I'm pretty sure (but not certain) that cell towers don't try to broadcast/recieve upwards because that would be a waste of power and money, so there's no guarantee of it working, especially at FL350.

I'm a bit bewildered by this video; especially the latter part because some assertions are just plane wrong. First, an airplane cannot ever become a radio-jammer, even if you have 600 phones continuously emitting at maximum power. Commercial airplanes fly so high that the tiny emitters in the phones just cannot reach any cell tower on the ground. If that were the case, there would be no remote mountainous area on the planet without phone reception. I think probably everyone here at some point was in such a remote area with no cell phone towers and can confirm that having no reception is a thing. And you don't even need to be a kilometer away from the nearest tower. Second, airplanes are so fast (iirc around 600-800kph) that, even if phones could reach that far down unto the ground, they would be too slow to establish a connection to one tower before it would be out of reach again. The real answer thus is: (a) We need airplane mode because regulators and airlines say so, and (b) we need it because otherwise our phones are going to burn through their battery fast. Interference may have been an issue once, but is no longer, especially not between a plane and the ground. But that wouldn't make for 17 minutes of video, I guess ;)

The battery life aspect is a reason to use airplane mode on the ground too. If you're somewhere that the signal is far too weak, you'll find your battery drains absurdly fast. I lived in a house that managed to sit right in a cellular dead spot so I made it routine to turn airplane mode on at home. Wifi calling capability on the phone meant I didn't lose any calling functionality in airplane mode.