Daniel wants to know what would actually happen if he didn't put his phone in airplane mode.

The honest answer turns out to be more complicated than "it'll crash the plane."

Airplane mode mainly turns off your phone's cellular radio — the part that's constantly searching for towers even when you're not using it. Every few seconds, your phone sends out a quiet signal looking for a connection. It never stops. And when the rule was first written in 1991, the concern was that hundreds of phones doing that simultaneously inside a metal aircraft might create enough electromagnetic interference to confuse the plane's navigation and communication equipment.

So the FCC banned it. Before any scientific study had actually proved it was dangerous. It was a precaution.

Studies since then have found very little evidence that ordinary ph ...