Mike D. wrote:
"... when airborne, our phones access far more cell towers simultaneously than they do while on the ground. When that many cell towers see the same phone, it somehow confuses, or overloads the system, or at least has the potential to do that..."
I know that cell base stations know their gps coordinates, as does the phone if enabled. If a phone transmitted its gps when logged-in to a swath of towers, I could imagine a Telco (telephone company) software solution that says:
- This phone gave us its gps loc, so the geo-nearest 3 towers will continue to track it and the remainder will reject, or,
- This phone is showing up on fifteen towers and doesn't report gps location so let's all reject that device for the next X minutes
I would think that such a solution already exists, as they have jillions of airline customers leaving their devices on. This includes forgotten devices, turned on, and left in the overhead bin, which if you ask me how such a thing could happen I'm going to plead "The 5th."
BTW, this function seems more like a text message to me than an email, and being a one-way conversation, the app could be designed to suspend airplane mode and wait for the first tower connection, then blert out the message (& verify receipt), then instantly restore airplane mode again. Repeat every 15 minutes or so as needed. No need to keep logging into/out-of myriad networks as the flight progresses just so it can send progress reports.
A really simple app, perhaps running in the PNF (phone-not-flying) could calc the appropriate data and send a message given that its gps is enabled and the pilot has entered the destination airport ID and recipient email address (or phone number) into the app. However, if it's part of iFly, then the destination is already in the flight plan, and gps data is enabled by default.
[The following key point was omitted in the initial post:]
This thinking relies on the potential that interested parties would petition the FCC and thereby obtain a regulation change to go along with a Telco software solution that might allow such a very limited and managed transmission to become legal.