FCC to FAA: Allow ‘greater use’ of electronic devices during flights
The head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on Thursday pushed for wider in-flight use of electronic portable devices during airplane flights. — FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski called …
Context & Ripple Effects
FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski's public nudge to the FAA lands mid-way through an activist stretch at the commission: in 2012 alone the agency ordered Verizon to stop blocking Android tethering apps, approved Verizon's purchase of SpectrumCo's AWS spectrum from Comcast and Time Warner, and kicked off rulemaking for a June 2014 incentive auction to reclaim broadcast TV spectrum. Pushing the FAA on portable electronic devices extends the same consumer-device-first posture to another regulator's jurisdiction.
The story travelled unusually far for a chairman's letter — Engadget, CNET, NYT Bits, The Verge, TechCrunch and Ars Technica all carried it the same day — reflecting how directly the FAA's device rules touch every reader of those outlets. With no prior corpus coverage of the FAA's review, this is the opening move in the file.
First-order effects
- The FAA now faces public pressure from a fellow agency to revisit its portable-electronics rules, putting its testing and certification process for devices in takeoff and landing modes under scrutiny.
- Airlines are the immediate implementers: any relaxation flows through their fleets, so carriers' operational and training decisions become the bottleneck between the FCC's request and what passengers may actually do.
Second-order effects
- If the FAA loosens restrictions, in-flight Wi-Fi and connectivity offerings gain a larger addressable audience of powered-on devices, sharpening competition among airlines to bundle connectivity into the cabin experience.
- Device makers and app developers get a clearer runway for features designed around gate-to-gate use, shifting product assumptions that today still hedge against shutdown-at-takeoff requirements.
Third-order effects
- The episode frames cabin electronics policy as an inter-agency harmonization problem — spectrum authority at the FCC, safety authority at the FAA — a structure that will recur whenever consumer radio-equipped devices outpace aviation-era rules.
- If the pattern holds, device-use rules converge internationally as regulators watch each other's reviews, turning what was a national safety determination into a competitive question among flag carriers and aircraft markets.
The trend: Aviation regulators are being pushed to rewrite device-use rules written for a pre-smartphone era, with the FCC pressing the FAA to treat always-on consumer electronics as the default case rather than the exception.