When you get on a plane, you are asked to turn of “all electronic devices” until the seat belt sign is turned off, and the same before landing.

Each time this happens to me as I sit there with my nose buried in an ebook on one or other of my trusty ereaders I find myself extremely irritated by this command, as I can see no logical reason for this prohibition.

Possibly if the WiFi or 3G connectivity side of my ereader was switched on I might find it reasonable, but as I can turn those off, much as you can set your mobile phone in “Plane” Mode I feel that this is rather silly.

To add insult to injury, I know that now many pilots use iPads for all their preflight check lists and a whole range of other tasks that used to be done with the help of paper lists – not only this, but an increasing number of airlines are now offering to hire you iPads to watch videos during the flight.

So my point is, if an iPad is OK for the pilot and for passengers to watch videos during the flight, why do we need to turn our own ereaders off at each end of the flight?

If someone can give me a good explanation as to why this is considered necessary I should be most grateful.

Share with us:

Do you know if there is actually any real risk to the planes electronics if we have our ereaders switched on – with the WiFi turned off?