So clearly this is again an airline using a rule as a "proxy" for something else they want.

Like no chewing tobacco... Yeah it is gross but it is probably not a safety issue.

Flying is among the most dreadful activities I do. The whole thing is unsettling from the moment I pull up to the airport.

This is one of many absolutely ridiculous things the airline industry has enforced.

But.. I must fly places, so I just suffer like the rest.

Note that voip calls are prohibited even though you can get internet access. This is because of annoying other customers, not because of safety.

Wouldn’t it also be bandwidth consumption on a limited connection?

Perhaps on the upload but download bandwidth can seemingly deal with a plane full of people streaming Netflix these days, so that's not an issue.

Netflix on a plane? I have never seen that. Which onboard wifi allows that? Perhaps you are thinking of movies delivered via wifi, but the content is streamed from the plane itself.

Qantas has been able to do Netflix/Youtube/whatever on a plane with free wifi for several years. I'm not talking about onboard entertainment, which is a separate thing with a separate app (which is, on the domestic flights where free wifi is offered, largely obsolete at this point). It's not without momentary buffering issues, and I will tend to download things in advance for that reason, but 99% of the time it's pretty good.

I’ve been able to stream video on an Air Canada flight from Vancouver to London, afaik it’s the same GoGo satellite service that seemingly everyone else has.

Yeah they explicitly allowed movie streaming from basically any site but not voip.

There’s no way they had all the YouTube cached on the olane

1) The wifi system is EMC certified and tested with the flight instrumentation. Dozens of different consumer devices are not.

2) Lufthansa "allows it during the entire flight without restriction – even during take-off and landing unless the crew instruct otherwise"(https://bluetoothtechworld.com/can-i-use-bluetooth-headphone...). In other words, unless you're told to turn it off in the event of some problem, which is something you can't do when it's in the luggage hold of the aircraft.

Again, the articles specifies this is about EMC.

Their wifi system might be, but a 100 phones and tablets, some from reputable manufacturers, some from "10TB tablet apple samsung iphone" sellers from aliexpress, and the system still works.

Imagine planes falling down because a single passenger had a malfunctioning phone on it... the lawsuits against boeing/airbus would be astronomical.

Not sure what about my comment you take to be an endorsement of opaque, seemingly unreasonable EMC rules. I don't make them, know if they work or particularly care for the purpose of this thread. The concerns stated, justified or otherwise, were about RF emissions and not battery fires.

Oh yeah, I guarantee that's on all the emergency checklists. "Ask very nicely if all the passengers can turn off their bluetooth headsets".

Also, I'm pretty confident that Lufthansa's Airbus and Boeing planes are the same as everybody else's Airbus and Boeing planes. If there was an EMC issue that they were running into from Airtags, it would have been jumped on by the national aviation administrations so fast your head would spin. It would be major international news. It would not be an obscure rule with misleading and contradictory guidance coming from a single airline.

I suspect the difference is more about the spectrum in use. Airtags can be found and interact via Ultra-Wideband (UWB), which essentially means low power broadcast across 3.1GHz up to 10GHz approx. This includes some spectrum used for GNSS.

One is probably fine but a hold full of them and people's iPhones emitting on UWB also?

By contrast Bluetooth, WiFi etc use the ISM radio bands, which can simply be avoided by any transmission the plane itself needs to do.

UWB, which is pretty new, would be a really good explaination of why they single out these trackers specifically. Without some solid test results to clear them, it's understandable why airlines might be nervous.

Would just add that it's more what the aircraft needs to reliably receive (not transmit) that is susceptible to local sources of spurious RF.

Yeah agree, receive is probably what I should have said :) I did try to see if there were any discussions of UWB before posting, but only found some PDFs from the FAA from 2015 or so in my casual search. I guess industry insiders might know more. It could well be that the low power was deemed not risky enough (you would have thought all airlines would have banned them if risky) and other posts suggest that in fact Lufthansa have not banned airtags at all... so who knows.

Is that certification actually important?

It seems to me like a denylist would be more useful than an Allowlist at this point.

Almost no consumer electronics are dangerous to a plane

Apparently, to them, yes.

All airline I've been travel, disable WiFi during takeoff and landing.