Press & PR

Airline passengers would not want to suffer the incessant ringtones and loud conversations that would plague their flights if mobile phones were made useable on their journeys.

According to a spokesman from the management, engineering and development consultancy Mott Macdonald, the relative calm on planes would be broken if people were allowed to make calls using their mobiles in-flight.

"Instead of: 'I'm on the train' we'll have: 'I'm on the plane'," said Mott Macdonald's director of aviation strategy, Laurence Price.

"I think it is actually quite nice to be away from it for a while, particularly when you're going long haul."

He added that this would be especially the case in more expensive cabin classes, such as first or business class.

"Someone bleating into a phone for two hours is not what I want if I'm paying reasonable money to go in one of the better cabins on an aeroplane," he explained.

Last week, telecoms watchdog Ofcom gave the green light for mobile use on planes to go ahead – as long as customers pay for the privilege.

However, Vonage managing director Kerry Ritz noted that the suggested scheme "would simply allow mobile operators to squeeze cash out of a captive audience by charging them for expensive calls to recapture money they're losing on the ground".

He argued that the scheme proposed by Ofcom did not offer real choice for consumers and instead called for inexpensive wifi services, which would allow passengers to access VoIP services and not simply "land them with expensive airborne GSM".