Ask HN: Are mobile phones on a plane taking off or landing really dangerous?

Are there any actual studies and detailed research with proof that having my mobile phone on during take off or landing provides and increased risk of the plane crashing (or other adverse reaction?)

I mean logically if planes did not have sufficient shielding for this would a terrorist not just bring about 1000 phones (say its for export for sale) as hand luggage and just leave them on? Also some planes now now allow mobile phones to be used on board.

Things that have been done for the sake of it or have continued because that was the way it has always been really annoy me. And I really hate having to switch off my phone and my RSS reader getting dirty looks for fellow passengers.

It has to do with FCC regulations. This is terribly handwavy, because I barely remember the explanation, but basically, they have to make sure that the plane isn't giving off certain signals and interfere with anything, and the easiest way to do that is just to tell everyone to switch their devices off.

Hopefully someone can clarify that a bit.

Leave your phone near a CRT screen or loudspeaker, observe the noise right before you recieve a call.

The rest is statistics and probability. What's the probability of interference causing a fatal misreading in aircraft's sensor? Too small. What's the number of flights world wide? Too big. We would see a number of accidents if everyone kept their phones on all the time. As a death is one too many, it warrants the ban.

I find it hard to believe that a plane's avionics are sufficiently shielded to withstand a direct lightning strike, but one person's phone will crash the plane.

I've heard other explanations, too, such as the fact that too many mobile towers are line-of-sight at the same time, and the effective ground speed means you'd hop towers far too often and it'd mess with the phone system. Multiplied times the number of mobile-phone-carrying passengers in the air at any given time, I suppose it's plausible.

Another reason I've heard argued by a coworker is that they aren't banning electronics for the sake of interference, but for your attention.

If anything were to go wrong during a flight, takeoff and landing are the two times that they want you to be able to react with zero hesitation. If something goes wrong and you have seconds to react, the less things you're fiddling with the more likely you are to survive.