I flew with the company's CMO last week from ATL-LAX, and discovered something. She was on her Blackberry for the entire flight. I thought she was on Wi-Fi or airplane mode. Somewhere over Oklahoma, she leaned over to me and asked, "are you getting a signal? I'm not getting any bars of service."

I was a bit surprised and said, "you know there's Wi-Fi on this flight" and she shrugged, "it's okay I can wait until we're closer to a coverage area."

After an awkward few minutes, I leaned over her and offered, "I think they might have asked us to turn cell phones off earlier" -- trying to be diplomatic. She typed away with her thumbs and wondered aloud, but in a sincere way, "do you think it's causing problems in the cockpit?" I replied, "I hope it wouldn't be so easy to do that."

I didn't pursue it any further... it was clear that the CMO knew what she was doing. Before landing, below 10K feet, everytime an FA walked by, she would turn the screen over or hide it under the blanket, then go right back to sending email. We didn't crash, but I did a different take on why she's widely considered a rule breaker in our industry.