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Comment by mseebach | Hacker News Reader

Yes they were. Flight attendants consistently ask people to put away their Kindles and iPads.

Of course they didn't and couldn't check if the devices are completely switched off (or even in flight safe mode), but they very much keep people from using them.

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Flying mostly from/to the UK, that's not exactly what I saw. Most of the time people will put the device on their lap with the screen turned off and get back to using it as soon as the flight attendants are in their seats. Pretty much the same thing with "please leave your seatbelts fastened until the engines are off" (with click, click, click all around).

I observe the click-click-clickers too and believe they are monumental idiots that not only endanger themselves, but other passengers as well. And all this for no good reason at all.

Watch the video, taken by an amateur in JFK, of an AirFrance A380 touching a smaller plane and spinning it around and imagine you where sitting in the small plane not buckled up:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13054205

The reason why this behavior mystifies me so much is that by jumping out of your seat prematurely you will be leaving the plane exactly 0 seconds earlier as when you remain buckled up until the plane is safely parked at the gate.

Not to mention turbulence, which can pick you up, bang your stupid head on the luggage bin so that it cracks and then throw you back in a seat. This seat might not even be yours and you injure other people with your stupidity. See

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/06/05/travel/sg-airlines-turbule...

http://avherald.com/h?article=45946d01

I never understood the stander-uppers either... until I got caught behind someone who took 10 minutes to get their overstuffed luggage out of the overhead locker. That's an annoying wait. These days it's a crapshoot - if I have people waiting for me, I'll be a stander-upper. Otherwise I'll sit until it's clear.

Standing up in the aisle is more comfortable than sitting my fat butt in a tiny seat. :)

Well, I can't speak to your personal experience, but the "click-click-clicking" is in my experience a perfect example that most people try to do what the flight attendants tell them to.

As soon as the plane lands, there is a tricke of clicks until the plane is parked. And when the "fasten your seatbelts"-sign is switched off, the rest of the passengers go "click". From my experience, this sounds like most of the passengers.

(My experience is mostly from Norway and Europe in general)

That's the purpose of those rules: To give flight attendants a plausible safety-related task. That takes the passengers' minds off the fact that airliner safety rituals for passengers are absurd and that other aspects of in-flight service are sub-par.

Sure, they may be absurd, but the safety record of commercial air transport is absurd as well. (If you don't want or appreciate that safety level, light, ultralight or experimental aircraft are good options that allow for different risk tradeoffs).

What's absurd about the safety stuff, aside from the fact that most of us have the thing memorized by now and don't really need to hear it every time?

> but they very much keep people from using them.

I think you mean "suppress their use for literally seconds at a time".

I've heard (from Pilot friends) that Pilots & Flight Attendants are the worst for leaving devices switched on.

A while back, a JetStar pilot forgot to drop the landing gear coming into Singapore because he got a txt message

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1286044/Jetstar-pilo...

For sure. I was once asked to remove my headphones even though they were visibly not plugged in to anything (I wanted to block out the noise from takeoff).

No they weren't: the rule was "turn devices to airplane mode AND power them off". I don't know anybody that powered them off.

Yes you were.

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