Turn off your Palm Pilots

This isn’t a post about RIM‘s stellar quarter (why does Palm even exist anymore?), but about the Air Canada “In Charge” Flight Attendant on a very busy Montreal-Toronto A330 flight yesterday afternoon. As we were waiting for my second on-time departure in a row (a record), he instructed the passengers “to turn off your Palm Pilots as they interfere with aircraft controls“.

Several things come to mind:
– I though Palm Pilots were about as passive a thing as a Filofax; what is it about the electronic organizer that might crash the plane? And if things are that dicey in the air, why can we bring them onto the aircraft in the first place?
– if the cell phone radio broadcasts at its peak in the air, what damage is the guy next to me doing to us all, unbeknownst to me, if he leaves his cell phone on throughout the entire flight?
– to keep your attention, they make you store the handhelds during takeoff and landing, but not paperback books or newspapers; why can I read a paperback book during the takeoff cycle but not a book that I’ve downloaded onto a non-email handheld device?

RIM will spend $146 million next quarter marketing their wares. Perhaps a trip to Air Canada’s headoffice, for a personal briefing, would be a good use of time? Mike could tell Robert (don’t call me Bob) Milton once and for all that RIM’s can’t crash a plane. But do they even know for sure that they don’t? After all, the Airbus fleet was largely built prior to RIM’s arrival.

Or maybe they just love it when, hundreds of times a day, flight attendants throughout North America say: “please turn off your cellphones and wireless devices, such as Blackberry…“. No one says “turn off your cellphones, such as Motorola’s Razr“. So maybe Jimmy doesn’t mind so much.

I know this will fall on deaf ears, but it continues to be a source of humour, each and every single time. “Turn off your Palm Pilots as they interfere with aircraft controls.” Ya, right.

MRM