If you have flown in the last decade, you know the ritual: switch your phone to airplane mode before takeoff. In other words, aviation authorities were worrying about electronic emissions decades before passengers carried cellular phones. Apple allows Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to be activated while an iPhone remains in airplane mode, and Android devices can remember the same preference. There is likewise no evidence in the regulatory record that airplane mode was created principally to silence cheap audio amplifiers. Airplane mode became the interface that reconciled those concerns with passengers’ desire to keep using their devices.