Disruptions: How the F.A.A., Finally, Caught Up to an Always-On Society

You know the scene in a movie when a character trails off into the past and is reminded of the moment it all began? I had one of those last week.

It was 2011, and I was engrossed in an e-book on my Kindle and kept reading as I boarded a plane heading back to San Francisco. My head down, I bumped into the plane door, then into a passenger. I finally buckled in, continuing to read. Then, just a few pages from the end of the book, I heard it. “Please power down your electronic devices for takeoff.”

Millions of people have heard this command, but I couldn’t help wondering how a $70 Kindle, which has the electronic innards of a glorified calculator, could make a $100 million plane fall from the sky?

After the trip (and finally finishing my book), I asked Les Dorr, a spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration, why the rule existed. He said, “The agency would rather err on the side of caution when it comes to digital devices on planes.”

Not long after that flight, I wrote a column with the headline, “Fliers Must Turn Off Devices, but It’s Not Clear Why.” Within minutes, the e-mails questioning the ban on electronics during takeoffs and landings started pouring into my in-box. The column received 257 comments and was shared thousands of times on social media. Other Americans, it seemed, were as perplexed as me.

Over the next two years, I wrote more than a dozen pieces questioning the rule. The New York Times employed EMT Labs, an independent testing facility in Mountain View, Calif., to see if a Kindle actually gave off enough electromagnetic emissions to affect a plane. The findings: An Amazon Kindle emitted less than 30 microvolts per meter when in use. That is only 0.00003 of a volt. A Boeing 747 must withstand 200 volts per meter. That is millions of Kindles packed into each meter of the plane. Still, the F.A.A. said “No.”

But then something started to change: society. For many years, we have heard that paper will one day be replaced by display screens. Printers, fax machines and even print books and magazines would be things of the past. And over the last few years it started to happen. While we may not have noticed it as much in the workplace or at home, it was on planes, places with strict rules about using the devices, that we saw how much people had come to depend on electronic devices.

And we also saw how slowly government — comically, at times — adapts to technology.

Last week, a 28-member panel set up last year to revise policies for electronics on airplanes recommended that the F.A.A. change the rule, allowing passengers to use their devices from gate to gate, including takeoff, taxiing and landing. Cellphone calls will still banned. People will probably be asked to turn their gadgets to “airplane mode” when they fly.

I asked one of the panel’s members last week how the panel knew that changing the rule would not make planes, and the Kindles and iPads and passengers inside those planes, drop from the sky.

Paul Misener, vice president for global public policy at Amazon and chairman of the technical subcommittee of the F.A.A. working group, said we could actually thank old television sets for this history of gadget regulation on planes.

“There were a couple of cases decades ago where there were interferences noticed to some avionics, typically very old avionics, from devices like FM radios, or TV receivers with vacuum tubes,” Mr. Misener said. “There were instances where a plane would fly through a radar beam or a TV signal and see interference, and as a result, both the F.A.A. and the international community adopted rules that planes had to be resilient to those interferences.”

As a result, he said, they also unwittingly protected planes from future electronics.

Today’s devices, Mr. Misener said, produce barely external electricity. “The opportunities for interference are tiny,” he said. “Aircraft don’t have avionics that operate on the same bands as portable devices, therefore the equipment is resilient to interference.”

Mr. Misener said that going into the committee he knew it wasn’t a matter of science. “Several years ago, we filled up a commercial airplanes (Republic Airlines) with Kindles and turned them all on,” he said. “Something like 150 Kindles; the plane didn’t experience any problems.”

Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, who has pressed the F.A.A. to relax the ban, said telling the flying public that a device could interfere with a plane was one of those silly rules that make people roll their eyes at other, more rational rules, like obeying the “fasten seat belt” sign.

“If people are being told to do things because it keeps the public safe, there needs to be solid scientific data that supports that, and clearly that was not the case with this prohibition,” Ms. McCaskill said.

There is, however, one caveat to all this: people on the committee have warned that the F.A.A. might still take another year or more to carry out the rule.

Ms. McCaskill said she was not prepared to wait.

“If the F.A.A. doesn’t come out with a reasonably prompt timeline in the next 60 to 90 days, then I will go full bore to get this done legislatively,” she said.

With a report in hand that says devices cannot harm a plane, she said, it will be easy to push through legislation requiring the change.