Opinion: Cells on a plane? No way, says Dianne Feinstein

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With her home base in San Francisco but her day job in Washington, Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California knows well the travails of air travel these days. So perhaps she can be excused for the tangent she took earlier this week when the acting administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration got hauled before a Senate subcommittee, ostensibly to talk about airline safety lapses and lax oversight of the industry.

When it was her turn to quiz Robert Sturgell, she didn’t ask about the groundings that have left so many frustrated passengers delayed or stranded at airports the last few weeks.

What was on Feinstein’s mind was cell phones, according to Times reporter James Hohmann, who was at the hearing.

Prompted by a news story she read last week, Democrat Feinstein wanted to know if America would follow Europe’s lead and allow cell phone use on commercial flights.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen if I have to listen, or anybody has to listen, to the person next to them talking loudly on their cell phone for five-and-a-half hours as we travel from Washington to San Francisco,” she said.

“I mean, I’d rather not travel,” she added. “Some people are so painfully loud on their cell phone that you know everything about them by the time they hang up.”

So, she pressed ...

the beleaguered Sturgell, “Are we going to have to listen to them cross country?”

“Senator, my top priorities are staffing and runway safety and our oversight,” he replied, adding that the cell-phone issue ‘is far, far, far down the list.”

For once, bureaucratic inertia was the right answer.

“So that means you’ll never get to it,” Feinstein said. “Which is fine by me!”

-- Don Frederick