Perhaps the clue is in "illiterate" and "read"?

I am sure that MO'L would just love me to be on the phone when down the back of his aircraft dictating the latest safety violation to the office so that the Irish CAA could get hold of the information before landing. I have not had to do it for a couple of months, but there again, I have not flown Ryanscare for a couple of months. Perhaps they might be related?

Ah, most of you are so young.... not to remember the phones in the seatbacks of BA aircraft all those years ago.

I did use a seatback phone to arrange for the FAA heavies and FBI to turn up to arrest somebody on a flight once. Greyhound One departure from PHX to PDX for him to get home.

As you have noticed, what was deemed unsafe, suddenly becomes safe when there is money involved. Actually, the banning of phones was related to a couple of specific issues. Firstly, the phone companies did not want all the phones polling lots of different stations. So, the authorities banned it. There was a reasonable amount of research done to demonstrate that most aircraft post 1968 did not suffer too much interference. The fuel indicators in the 146 bounce around a bit and the Dash 8-400 seemed to think that there was a fire in the baggage hold, but ....

Perhaps the second reason was historic. There were indications on board a certain aircraft, cannot say who operated it, but the registration G-OCAA may give indications, which was using a basic old GPS unit (and they were not approved for it at the time by er, the CAA) and this led to a navigation error of a couple of hundred miles. Of course, the fully qualified pilots did not happen to notice for a while. (Urban myth or true story, you decide )

Modern GPS and other navigation units (as well as flight management systems blah blah) do not suffer from this, and installed properly, it should not be a problem.

Still, now Boeing has decided to kill off Connexion by Boeing, then the sky might be a quieter place after all.