Say goodbye to Airplane Mode in the EU: Airlines set to introduce 5G on flights

If you’ve ever spent any time in an aeroplane, you’ll have heard the familiar refrain from the stewards: “For your safety, please put your handheld devices in flight mode.” It’s a cue for you to hurriedly finish their Internet browsing and make your last call to your loved one before begrudgingly turning off your access to the outside world. Some airlines go one step further by forcing you to completely switch off your phone for take off and landing, most notably Malaysia Airlines—although the latter finally changed its stance recently.

This may all soon be a thing of the past, if the European Commission’s recent ruling is any indication. The continent’s governing body has implemented amendments that allow airlines to offer 5G connectivity, letting customers use mobile data in the air “to the maximum of [their phone’s] capacity and features”, just like they would on the ground.

As such, passengers could soon be allowed to browse the Web, stream music and videos and even make phone calls on the flight—bypassing the expensive (and laughably slow) in-flight WiFi and mobile data services currently available—though it’s still unclear how all this will be implemented.

“5G will enable innovative services for people and growth opportunities for European companies,” said commissioner for the internal market Thierry Breton. “The sky is no longer a limit when it comes to possibilities offered by super-fast, high-capacity connectivity.”

This decision is an update to a 2008 ruling that reserved certain frequencies for in-flight WiFi and data. As with these services, airlines will be able to implement 5G connectivity via small cellular base station called a picocell, which will route calls, texts and data through a satellite network to a ground-based mobile network. Due to all this complicated rerouting, you probably shouldn’t expect full 5G speeds on an aircraft, and you may also be hit with exorbitant in-flight roaming charges from your telco, as is the case currently.

You’re probably wondering if using data on a flight is safe—after all, safety is often cited as a reason for mandating Airplane Mode on flights. There has traditionally been a concern that mobile phones could cause electromagnetic interference with an aeroplane’s electronic systems.

But aircraft wiring is nowadays shielded, and there is inconclusive evidence that mobile phones do cause interference, even after the US’s Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) commissioned a study back in 2006. However, the possibility is still there, no matter how remote, which is why airlines will likely continue to require Airplane Mode to be switched on for the critical take off and landing phases.

A bigger problem was that since planes fly at high speeds, a mobile phone would be switching cell towers often, which may crowd networks on the ground. That’s why it was the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), not the FAA, that prohibited mobile phones in the air in 1991, “to guard against the threat of harmful interference from airborne use of cellular phones to terrestrial cellular networks,” Gizmodo wrote. This might be the reason why in-flight data now has to be routed to satellites first.

More recently, there’s been a concern that 5G frequencies could interfere with flights, even causing erroneous altimeter readings. This is not a problem in the Europe and the UK, however, according to UK Flight Safety Committee chief executive Dan Whittingham.

“There is much less prospect of interference,” he told BBC News. “We have a different set of frequencies for 5G, and there are lower power settings than those that have been allowed in the US. The travelling public wants 5G. The regulators will open up that possibility, but there will be steps that will be taken to ensure that whatever they do is safe.”

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