Why the prospect of phone calls being allowed on planes fills me with dread

A recent ruling by the European Commission means that, pretty soon, passengers on aircraft in the EU will be able to use their phones “to the maximum of their capacity and features, just like with a ground-based 5G mobile network”.

Cue obnoxiously loud phone calls at 30,000 feet.

These expanded cabin services will be provided courtesy of special network equipment called “pico-cell”, which routes calls, texts and data, typically via a satellite network, between the plane and ground-based mobile networks. It is projected that airlines will begin offering these services as early as June next year.

There is still some debate about whether the power surge from a plane full of phones trying to connect to 5G will affect a plane’s altimeters, but I’ll leave it to the experts to iron out those details. I know very little about the intricacies of aircraft engineering, but I do know a little bit about human nature. And the prospect of hundreds of people chatting away while I’m trying to take a snooze on an overnight flight fills me with dread.

Planes are already a hotbed of social misdemeanours, as perfect strangers are forced to share minuscule amounts of space in ways entirely counter-intuitive in a post-Covid world.

I’ve spent the past 20 years travelling for work on an almost monthly basis ― and I’m still trying to work out who gets first dibs on the armrest, whether or not it is acceptable to recline your seat all the way, and whether you should wake up the person next to before you clamber over them to get to the loo ― or run the risk of them being startled into consciousness and find you straddling them.

In my experience, human beings are not known for their thoughtfulness when dealing with people they don’t know. Case in point, the woman sitting behind me on a flight from London last month, who spent the best part of an hour reading a story to her young son, across the aisle, at the top of her (annoyingly faux-childlike) voice.

I don’t want to have to listen to a bunch of inconsiderate strangers talking about their day, or their travel plans, or their latest business deal, or anything else, when I am unable to escape to a quieter spot. And I feel like cabin crew have enough to contend with without also having to manage the volume levels of boisterous passengers. Anyone who has ever been to the cinema in the UAE knows that there’s always that one person who forgets to put their phone on silent and then insists on answering a clearly non-critical call mid-movie, speaking in that mock whisper that is, in fact, not a whisper at all.

Beyond that, this latest ruling will rob me of my very last bastion of unreachability. I was upset enough when planes started to offer Wi-Fi and messaging services. In our increasingly connected world, there is virtually nowhere left where you are allowed to switch off completely.

That was what plane journeys used to represent for me. A few uninterrupted hours to myself, where I wasn’t obliged to manage the constant barrage of emails, WhatsApp messages and calls that plague my day-to-day existence. However hard I try to extricate myself, there is the unspoken expectation in 2022 that you should be reachable. At. All. Times. It is not unusual for me to receive an email, a follow-up email, a WhatsApp message and then a phone call from the same person in a single day, for something that is absolutely not urgent.

On a plane, I could curl up, watch a film, wait to be fed and know that the world would still be as I left it when I touched down a few hours later. The ability to make calls on planes just feeds into the great anxiety of our age ― that need to constantly be “on”, productive and connected.

I, for one, could do with a few hours off the hamster wheel every now and again. And the skies will soon no longer be my refuge.