This is mercifully brief follow up to my previous post on British Airways proscriptions on enabling flight safe mode on your mobile phone and hails jointly from the departments of "be careful what you ask for, it might come true" and "they didn't really mean to say that ... did they?" ...

On this morning's flight from London Heathrow to Berlin's Tegel the usual flight safety announcement was made, but with a couple of significant, if contradictory, changes.

"All electrical devices should be switched off during take off, landing and when the engines are running, some devices may be used after take off, please see High Life magazine for more information. If your mobile phone has a flight safe mode, it should be enabled now, before switching off the device and ensuring it is stowed in an overhead locker".

As part of the security and safety announcement that gets made each time you get onto a plane these days, there's invariably a bit which goes something like this ... "all electrical equipment should be switched off during taxiing, take off and landing and all devices with a flight safe mode should have this enabled now".

This makes sense; in the case of an emergency, the airline wants you concentrating on the emergency, not your laptop or your phone. It may also be the case that the phone may in some way interfere with the flight systems. Opinion on this is divided but the former seems a more realistic option than the latter.