It seems that Australian airlines Qantas and Virgin Australia will now allow passengers to keep their mobiles turned on during taxiing, take-off and landing under a new ruling from the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA).
Heralded as a bit of a revolution, passengers will be allowed to keep their mobiles turned on (albeit, in flight mode), and use tablets and e-readers, as well as portable games and other electronic devices from gate to gate, instead of having to turn them off when the final cabin door was closed.
CASA spokesman Peter Gibson has said that both Qantas and Virgin Australia have lodged applications to allow the respective airlines to take advantage of the new rules, which have since been approved from 26 August 2014.
A Qantas spokesperson told Ausdroid back in July of this year that it was working with CASA to implement the change, as it was cognisant of the moves by airlines internationally. In particular, the Qantas spokesperson made reference to New Zealand’s Civil Aviation Authority’s change in policy which allowed electronic devices to be used on most trans-Tasman routes.
Just in the last couple of weeks I travelled to California with Air New Zealand, and was pleasantly surprised by their electronic devices policy. As long as I took my headphones out to listen to / watch the safety briefing, I was allowed to return to viewing videos on my tablet from gate to gate, without having to power down during take-off and landing.
Have you been strictly adhering to the rules? Did you regularly flaunt them? Let us know.
I’ve had a spare cable plugged into the armrest socket in order to stop them bugging me about my headset plugged into my phone in a jacket pocket many times
Unless it’s a long haul flight, I keep them on. Long Haul, I turn flight mode on, as the battery drain is too high, as the phone increases transmission power to find a tower.