Error at 30,000 Feet

Imagine reaching cruising altitude at the start of a four-hour flight. The captain turns off the “fasten safety belt” sign, and another button beside it — this one with the image of a cell phone on it — lights up, spurring half the passengers to flip open their handsets and start chattering away.

With a new patent in hand, a Colorado company called AirCell is promising to achieve the above scenario by 2005. It's easy to imagine the demand for such a service, especially among business travelers. But loud cell phone users have already sparked fierce confrontations from nearby passengers on some commuter trains — and that's in “quiet cars” reserved for those who prefer silence. Airplanes offer no way to segregate cell phone users from those they offend. “I'm sick and tired of listening to every ‘big shot’ use his cell phone, and I've told some of them to their faces,” one rail-rider complained to the Connecticut Rail Commuter Council's Web site. Another proposed an outright cell phone ban. The backlash from airline patrons could be much worse.

Anyone who's flown lately knows tensions are high enough even before takeoff. After queuing through security, shoeless, while a former Circuit City trainee probes you with a magnetic wand — and those wand people aren't too shy to give you a good how's-your-father, if you know what I mean — you sulk through flight delays and trudge like cattle into cramped spaces with sweaty, obese strangers.

By the time you take your seat, the tension in the cabin is so thick that babies are afraid to cry. If some careless sap picks the wrong time to start braying on his handset, the other passengers are going to “upgrade” him into one of the overhead compartments faster than Richard Reid in a pair of red moon boots.

So caveat emptor, baby. AirCell would do well to market this service as “text only.” That might make it no more novel than existing in-flight e-mail and Internet services from the likes of Boeing and Tenzing Communications. But it could also save a lot of bloodshed.