Typically, when you’re sitting on a plane on the tarmac, you switch your phone to flight mode while you’re sitting through yet another “quirky” (boring) safety video. You’ll watch some inflight entertainment, read the airline magazine if you get really desperate, and wonder if anyone ever buys those random watches for sale in the “duty free” section. Then, finally, upon landing, you’ll be connected back to the Internet and you’ll finally feel like you can breathe again.
Only, this time, you forgot to set your plane on flight mode. You’re sitting at 30,000 feet, and… your phone has signal? You’re online, and you’re getting notifications and emails just like you’re on the ground. You’ve accidentally discovered that your flight has an on-board cell tower.
Connection
When you’re cruising on a passenger airliner, you would typically expect to see little to no cellular signal by sheer virtue of altitude and speed. For one thing, you’re blasting past at immense speed and not staying in any one coverage zone for very long at all. Meanwhile, while you’re probably within 10 kilometers or so, vertically speaking, cell towers generally have their antennas aimed at the ground, not the sky. There simply isn’t much signal available, and you’re zooming around a bit too fast to hang on to any cell tower before it’s disappeared out of range.
