The FCC says that it is not about to go ahead and authorize the use of cellphones on planes any time soon, mostly because not enough is known about what effect a cluster of handsets would have on the surrounding terrestrial wireless networks, not that there is any real danger of 800 MHz connectivity interfering with aircraft navigation systems.
The US regulator had issued a notice of proposed rulemaking back in 2004 and had at the time emphasized that it would not go ahead unless it could be sure that all the technical considerations were understood. It has discovered that airlines, equipment manufacturers and wireless providers are all still researching this area, and has put it away for the time being, crushing the order.
The FCC spends a lot of time and money looking into things like this, and often its research is relied upon by other overseas regulators. In the absence of a US ruling it is unlikely that anywhere else is going to go ahead and carry out enough work to re-assure everyone in the chain that cellular phones are harmless when used in the air.
When a cell phone cannot reach a base station with its radio signal, it just tries harder, expending more of its battery and boosting its signal. The resulting cacophony of a few hundred cellphones screaming in radio sign language as they fly, just out of range of base stations across the sky, worries the cellular operators as much as anyone else, because they worry that might cause mass interference in their networks.
There have been various schemes put forward, such as using base stations in the plane and then converting to signal to another satellite frequency for transmission to the ground, but no-one is quite sure on the best way forward.
This is how some airlines continue going about offering wi-fi in flight, but most of these have been abandoned, in particular the market leader Boeing’s Connexion service, which found there was no market. Had it managed to get this service off the ground everyone could have used Skype to talk from the sky.