"Can You Hear Me Now?" at 20,000 Feet

I stumbled upon the news that we may start seeing more people on their cell phones during airline flights with the improving technology, increasing cost-effectiveness and thus increasing demand for the ability to take and make phone calls during flight. I think this'll be awful.

When cooped up on a barely-physically tolerable seat on an airliner filled with stale recycled air, the last thing that I'd want is some guy in yapping away on a cell phone constantly asking "can you hear me now?" and making great efforts to sound and appear self-important because he's using a cell on an airliner. Despite reports to the contrary, I can't see how this won't cause considerably more friction between passengers than we presently see on trains and buses.

First of all, it's much more common for people to sleep on planes as opposed to other forms of public transportation. It's unlikely that one will sleep through one's stop on a plane, so people predictably allow the rumble of the turbofan engines to lull one to sleep (works like a charm on me). The trips are generally longer so you're hoping that sleeping will somehow help the time pass by more quickly, and there's only so many times you can read that "Great Sights in Houston" article on the in-flight magazine before the intense boredom you quickly doze off. People aren't going to take kindly to being constantly interrupted by cell phone shouters.

It'll also start getting freaky when it comes to doing the forensics around airplane disasters. Not to be morbid, but pilot cockpit voice recordings (CVR) before and during airplane crashes are pretty scary as it is. I'm not looking forward to hearing on the news and archived on the internet sound clips like, "Yes Sally, that merlot was definitely divine... I did try that new lasagna recipe putting shredded prosciutto on top of the, what the... AHHH AHHHH AHHHHH!!!"

And to that lady who complained to me about how loud I was tapping on my laptop keyboard on my train from Summit to New York (and who was pretty nasty, to be frank), I'm sure you're really going to wish I was your seatmate when you get stuck on that middle seat between two overweight guys with bad breath who spit as they shout into their cell phones. Not that I'd wish that upon you, of course.

Maybe we'll see the Acela "quiet car" concept replicated on these airlines. In any case, I'm sure it'll be only slightly less tolerable than my bawling baby. After all, my kids don't share more information about their personal lives or business dealings than people care to know.