Automatic airplane mode

I remember a world where you had to fly without cell phones (they hadn’t been mass-adopted). Now you can use one pretty much your entire flight. There was a time where you couldn’t use them at all during a flight, and that was super annoying. Then they let you use them during the flight, but not for take-off and landing. Now it’s pretty much open season.

There’s something beautiful about being offline and alone with your thoughts. It forces you to reflect, think, and even… be bored. Being bored is great, I wish we all had more time to do that in our increasingly busy world.

This got me thinking about Airplane Mode. What if it was automatically enabled based on a geofence around airports? I can imagine an immediate, strong public outcry if this went live. People would be livid.

On the one hand, this might be helpful when a flight is starting. However, it’d make calling an Uber, texting a loved one, or anything else you do after landing impossible. The lost productivity would be insane.

I can’t reasonably advise this feature, though it’d be interesting to see how people adapted to this constraint..

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