Originally Posted by
Foltan
And what exactly would the plane have hit during take-off for that to happen? I don't understand the scaremongering panic around plane travel. Sometimes you have to be realistic and accept that BA planes almost never crash and so making everyone tuck away their iPads and look at the ceiling afraid on every single one of the thousands of take-offs and landing every day is just ridiculously over the top.
I don't think anyone would ever question the use of a laptop on a UK train, but there's been a lot more crashes and derailments of those than there have been BA aircraft hit the ground.
Originally Posted by
fransknorge
You are missing the point of this rule. This is not about crashing but there are several events possible during take-off and landing that can make a laptop or iPad fly around in the cabin:
- severe unexpected turbulence (can happen anytime, never been caught in the wake of the preceding aircraft ?)
- Refused take-off: braking action is hard, loose items will go flying. Those happens from time to time
- Go-around
This is not scaremongering, just common sense to apply for 15 minutes in the possibility that some of the events above happen (and they do happen, much more often than crashing) to avoid injuries.
I've had more severe forces exerted on me on an intercity train than during a refused take-off or a go-around, and severe turbulence (with the vertical component of force that is missing on a train, say) can happen at any time, not just take-off and landing.
I think the point is that air travel, because it has historically been perceived as risky, has all sorts of safety rules mandated. If we all had our time again, it would probably make sense to enforce the same regimes on other forms of public transport, and indeed egregious adverse events have eg resulted in mandatory seatbelts for coach travel in the UK. In an ideal world, it would probably make sense for there to be seatbelts fitted on trains too, but it's unenforceable and the train operators would all protest (I once had a journey from Euston to Liverpool Lime Street that was so lurching throughout that I literally could not read the book I was holding in my hand because it was moving so much - that was a trip where stowing loose objects and not serving hot drinks would have been a good idea!).
So I think it's more honest to say that what you experience on a plane, whilst harsh and not 100% necessary, represents optimal good practice, which could/should be followed elsewhere but isn't for historic or practical reasons.
But where I agree with
Foltan is that is isn't honest to say that being on an aircraft is so totally different from any other form of public transport that these special rules have to apply there because of imminent danger which is absent elsewhere. So we should say that it's better to stow a heavy laptop or tablet on a plane just because it's safer to do so, rather than pretending that that it's because there are unique forces and circumstances onboard which you wouldn't face elsewhere... To do otherwise does, I think, perpetuate the myth of how
dangerous flying is, which is why it scares so many people in the first place...