Phones on Planes: FCC's Proposal To Lift Cellphone Ban On Planes Could Lose Steam With Considerable Opposition
A recent plan to remove the 1991 ban on phone calls while on an airplane by the Federal Communications Commission is receiving a lot of negative feedback from thousands of travelers, the Los Angeles Times reported.
The Global Business Travel Association, a coalition representing business travelers from around the world and about 6,000 travel managers, joined the debate last week when the group submitted its opposition to the proposed plan.
It said that onboard phone calls would be "detrimental to business travelers," while it also quoted a line folk singer Pete Seeger wrote that was heavily influenced by the book of Ecclesiastes: "there is a time to keep silence and a time to speak."
Many travelers submitted their comments with their concerns or approval to the Department of Transportation during its 30-day window of accepting the remarks that began on Feb. 21. On the last day of accepting comments, the business travel group submitted their study on the effects of business travel.
According to the travel group's new study, business travelers spent $491 billion in 2012, which is the equivalent of 3 percent of the U.S. domestic product, the Times reported.
The majority of the 1,752 comments the transportation agency collected have been in opposition of the phone call proposal. One anonymous traveler compared the allowance of cell phones in such a confined space to an awkward situation in hell.
"No please, no," the person said in the comment. "Adding voice calls to the ever shrinking confines of a commercial airline would be like sending passengers to hell with gasoline underpants."
According to USA Today, while the majority is in favor of keeping the ban, hundreds of people are not opposed to sending silent texts.
The FCC's proposal to reconsider the ban came in December because the concern that cell phones and electronics disrupt ground-based communications with the plane are outdated now that planes can carry its own towers.
Today also reported that out of the 2,692 U.S. voters polled in December by the Quinnipiac Polling Institute, 59 percent oppose the use of cellphones on planes and 30 percent are ok with it.