JEDDAH, 21 January 2008 — The airline flight crew requests passengers to switch off their cell phones, but what happens when passengers won’t?
An Alitalia flight from Milan was aborted on Saturday and three passengers arrested after their continued cell phone use interfered with the airline’s navigation equipment. Both abroad and in the Kingdom, scofflaws are endangering planeloads of passengers simply for a text message or a call.
In Saudi Arabia, people refusing to switch off their cell phones even after the imploring of pilots and stewardesses is becoming a common occurrence on domestic flights.
“We regularly see flight stewardesses shouting at passengers who refuse to switch off their cell phones,” Mazin Salem, a young Saudi executive, told Arab News in Jeddah. “Sometimes obstinate passengers do it out of ignorance and sometimes they do it out of utter contempt for the safety rules and regulations. They take offense at flight crew ordering them to switch off their cells.”
Ghassan Majdali, a local bank executive, said that on one of his business trips to Riyadh, a man in his late 40s refused to turn his mobile off throughout the flight despite numerous pleas by other passengers and the flight crew.
“The man refused to believe that it was dangerous to keep the cell phone on during the course of the flight. ‘Do you actually believe all that?’ was the way he countered fellow passengers,” Majdali said. “He continued talking endlessly even as the plane took off. When we got off the plane, he gave a dirty look to all those passengers who were requesting him to switch off. He was mocking everybody.”
“Yes, it is a pretty common scene,” laments Muayad Aziz, a Saudi in his 30s. “Now people think twice before telling co-passengers to turn off their cell phones. What if they hit back, saying: ‘What’s your problem?’”
Some women have also been said to be ignoring the rules. “I kept telling my co-passenger to switch off,” Saudi teacher Abeer Fawaz said of a woman sitting next to her on a recent Jeddah-Dammam flight. “She would refuse, saying it was none of my business to teach her what to do and what not to. Throughout the flight she was merrily texting away. I tried to reason with her saying that by doing so she is jeopardizing the lives of all other people on board. She would have none of it. And instead said: ‘Please don’t pay heed to these inflight announcements. Just relax.’ The thing is she just didn’t realize that what she was doing was a crime.”
Abeer recommends a television and newspaper campaign to inform people of the dangers involved. “There is a lot of ignorance about the issue here,” she said. “I have seen that the flight crew refuses to go beyond a certain limit. They are business-minded, and they don’t want to lose business. Plus, the inflight crew is not sure how their bosses will react if they took a tough line with the passengers.”
In the Alitalia incident, police boarded the plane at Milan-Linas airport and arrested the three offending passengers identified by the flight crew. The three face prosecution for failing to observe safety regulations and could face up to three months in jail. The plane was finally able to take off for Bari an hour and a half later on Saturday morning.
