“The usage of mobile phones during flight is prohibited. Please switch off your mobile phones or keep them in airplane mode.” – is something most of us find really unpleasant and the rest of us probably ignore completely.
While there has been considerable amount of debate on whether mobile phone usage in flight causes any interference to electric signals of the flight communication system, the sane among us doesn’t want to take unnecessary risks with that.
But what about those of us who knowingly or unknowingly leave their phones ON during flight? There surely are risks associated with that?
Well, one of the world’s largest phone makers does worry about the safety of its customers. In a recent patent filed by Samsung, it claims rights to a feature of automatically switching phones off into flight mode without the user worrying about it. Details can be found here.
How A Samsung Phone Determines its Presence in a Flying Aircraft
The mobile device according to the patent includes a barometer and an altimeter to measures the cabin atmospheric pressure and the flight altitude. Apart from this, the Smartphone will also store information about cabin atmospheric pressure and flight atmospheric pressure of each aircraft model in a separate database.
The mobile device will calculate the cabin atmospheric pressure and flight altitude by using barometer and altimeter.
In the next step, the Smartphone controller checks whether the calculated values are included in one of the cabin atmospheric pressure and a flight atmospheric pressure for an aircraft model.
Moreover, the controller also checks whether the smartphone is in out of communication range or not. After determining these criteria, controller concludes that the whether the smartphone is present in a flying aircraft or not and determines that it should be on airplane mode or not.
On determining that the phone should be in airplane mode, the smartphone user will see a pop-up notification on device screen to switch to airplane mode. It would automatically switch if the user doesn’t respond after a predetermined period of time.
This technology could bring down the risk associated with interference associated with the airplane communication to zero. Plane travel could become safer and slightly more acceptable than present.
Another striking aspect of the application could include government regulation. Surely governments would love to have such technology in every mobile phone that goes up.
Samsung could benefit greatly to the tune of billions if the Aviation regulation authority mark this as a preferred feature. Thoughtful innovation! That’s how leaders remain leaders.
Do tell us what you think about this neat piece of technology from Samsung.
whoa…. the smart phones are becoming smarter!!! this is really a cool bit of technology. Hopefully, this will also prevent the misuse of people switching on their phones even when the plane is on active runway…
Yeah may be the acceleration sensor can be utilized to check the speed with which a smartphone is moving forward and the phone can be shifted to airplane mode.
yes.. still quite awesome… am also amazed at the minds that are thinking up of such innovative ideas!
Yes and these innovative minds bring the change always. Samsung is really working on a lots of innovative ideas.
One such is their emotional intelligent phonebook that detects caller’s emotions. I think you would surely love that.
Have a look at it – http://www.whatafuture.com/2014/11/12/samsung-innovative-phonebook-that-detects-emotions-of-caller/
I can see this technology being very useful in other places where cellphones can be a real problem like some hospital departments, for example.
Yes you are right. They can use the GPS location to know when a cellphone is inside a hospital premises and can send it to silent mode.