The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, aka the FCC is pushing for a wider use of electronic portable devices in flight. He’s asking Michael Huerta, the acting administrator of the FAA, Federal Aviation Administration to enable greater use of tablets during flights.
He also mentions e-readers and other portable devices as desirable items to use in an airplane. The FAA is already taking steps in the good direction, since it has started replacing notebooks, paper logs and charts used to fly the plane with iPads. Thousands of pages and huge aviation books are also replaced with tablets. FAA doesn’t want to revisit its policies regarding voice communication during flights, so that’s a dream for now. By “greater use”, the FCC means that the FAA should allow people to play with their iPads and other gear as much as they want on flights, especially since some of them already offer WiFi services.
Honestly speaking, there are some flights that last for over 12 hours and people aren’t happy with just dozing off or watching boring in flight movies. They really need their Facebook fix or Farmville… so FCC comes to the rescue, while FAA hesitates to approve any lenient measures.
