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I will be flying abroad next week. Do you all put your aids to flight mode?

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In reply to @FredO

Fred, that’s what i do as well during long flights, unless I’m in conversation with someone. I figure there isn’t any real reason to amply the noises in the airplane, and it’s easy enough to close the battery covers when I want to activate them to hear announcements, etc.

It’s crazy to turn off hearing aids during flight. I would guess that tens of thousands of people with hearing aids leave them on every single day.

Although the article is dated 2016, it seems “old” as it mentions needing to turn off fm assistive listening device, but no mention of bluetooth.

Nothing was mentioned on my flights with two different airlines, nor did I see signage, so I left them on except while sleeping. My return trip is two days from now and I expect the same

My husband was born with severe hearing loss. He wears shell (fitted mold) in the ear hearing aids and he has to remove them before taking off. The reason is that it hurts his ears due to the pressure. If he left them in he would be in pain and he still would not be able to hear. After we land he puts them back in and he can hear again.

You don’t need to turn off Bluetooth in a mobile phone for flight mode these days. If you select flight mode on a modern iPhone, Bluetooth stays on.

And some modern hearing aids use Bluetooth to allow the two aids to cooperate in noise cancellation, current Resound (& Jabra obviously) for example. No sense in turning that off.

Edited

Some phones may behave differently. For my 2020 Samsung, if I turn on wifi, bluetooth, gps and nfc and then go in to airplane mode, gps and nfc stay on but wifi and bluetooth go off. I can then turn them on while in airplane mode leaving just cell off.
I turn on airplane mode on the phone in-flight and if I wish to use bluetooth then I do. I sometimes get in the mood to get speed and location using gps.
I do not use airplane mode on the aids. I also use the tv connector which uses similar frequencies as bluetooth to listen to the on-board entertainment.

The manual should tell the procedure to turn off the blue tooth that sends radio waves that might be interfering with aviation radio frequencies or navigation equipment on the plane. It would be rare but a problem if the hearing aids send out spurious signals or frequencies they aren’t supposed to be transmitting. The FAA has this rule in case of these rare occasions.

You are out of date mate. And anyway Bluetooth from hearing aids is incredibly low powered, which is why the battery doesn’t run down. These days you can leave Bluetooth on a mobile phone switched on and that’s much higher power.

David, the reason I responded is because I am a pilot (single engine land, instrument rated, and also a commercial drone pilot) and the FAA requires that we be very careful about passenger electronics that broadcast a radio signal on planes. My Philips 9050 hearing aids on blue tooth will easily reach about 50-60 feet, and in an aircraft that’s close enough to avionics bays and navigation equipment and antennas, even in large aircraft. Now, it would be very rare that any thing bad might happen, but it’s a possibility to affect aircraft radios and nav equipment.making an unsafe situation especially on takeoff and landing and in bad weather.

I did some checking on Bluetooth in flight. Most airlines allow Bluetooth during the flight but restricted during take off and landing. The FAA has determined that Bluetooth is not a problem and jet blue now allows Bluetooth during the complete flight from take off to landing.

Edited

In reply to @Don_B

Well I defer to you regarding what is required by a commercial light plane pilot. But as a radio engineer myself, I do know a bit about Bluetooth.

The thing is that the hearing aid manufacturers do anything they can to reduce battery consumption. The batteries in a hearing aid are incredibly low powered. Receivers use relatively little power, but transmitters use a lot. So hearing aid transmitters only actually transmit when it’s essential. There are two separate use cases.

  1. If there is an app on a cellphone, then it will transmit to the hearing aid and there isn’t the same power restriction on a phone so the Bluetooth may well reach 50 or 60 feet to a hearing aid, but nothing will be coming back from that distance. In any case the FAA and other regulators aren’t worried about leaving Bluetooth switched on in flight mode, as evidenced by what Apple does with iPhones in flight mode - leaves Bluetooth on.

  2. Modern hearing aids worn binaurally (ie in both ears) use Bluetooth to talk to each other, for example to cancel noise or to focus on a person speaking in front of the hearing aid user. This is extremely low power because it can be on all the time. When this was first introduced by Resound, the word in the industry was that the rf link budget (that’s power out minus path loss) from one ear to the other was “marginable”. So nothing in that normal use of hearing aids is going to go more than about one foot.

In any case this question was posed by someone who is flying as a passenger on a commercial airline. I have flown on many commercial flights in the US, Europe and Africa in the last 15 years and no-one has ever asked me to put my hearing aids into a flight safe mode. And right now, the FAA advice is that Bluetooth on phones, tablets and laptops is fine all the time. Hearing aids aren’t even in question.

I fly from JFK to Barcelona twice a year… I carry on a phone and a Fire tablet i never fiddle with my aids. I do turn off my phone and fire tablet as asked for take off and landing. i use to ask the steward person about my hearing aids an always got a ‘they are fine’

I’ve flown commercially to many countries OS. I’ve never been asked or I’ve never put my aids into flight mode

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