The sky’s the limit.

I have a voice control problem. Twice, I have been told to turn down my volume when in the air, once by a fellow passenger and once by a trolley dolly. Imagine what would happen if I was allowed to take to the skies, with a telephonic device surgically attached. Well beware. By the start of next year, BMI Baby, Ryan Air and Air France fans may be able to do just that.

I’m a little confused. The Guardian has announced that Transport for London will soon be dishing out on the spot fines to anyone listening to Sean Kingston too loudly on their iPod (not that I would disagree with this particular sanity-preserving mechanism.) And yet the European Aviation Safety Agency are about to give free rein to an aeronautic soundtrack worthy of any glossy mag’s problem page.

Just imagine the mixture of banal and exasperating conversations flitting around the cabin, thousands of feet above ground level: the lovers’ tiff, the business man demanding steak for dinner on arrival, the nervous first-time flyer needing constant weather reports and the hormonal teen stressing about Saturday night’s outfit. Talk about disturbance.

Then you’d have the 34 year old IT-geek click, click, clicking away, playing Snake and desperately trying to beat his PB before the in-flight up-date. And what about the couple who have just met in departures over a Prêt à Manger sandwich and embark on a never-ending textathon throughout the journey? The Mile High Club would go techno, and phone sex would take to the skies.

The mixture of ring tones would be worse than that infamously infuriating cinema advert. Whizzing across time zones would ensure a relentless racket of tinny pop tunes and keyboard demos. And some Trigger Happy TV wannabe joker would inevitably impersonate the mobile phone scene midway across the Atlantic just as your sleeping pills are kicking in.

So would there be a “turn off to switch off” flight deck mantra? A silent mode policy enforced upon sky-high chatterboxes? If that were the case, I can just picture a 747 dangerously veering off course as a result of the manic vibrations of a cabin-full of cell phones.

When on a train, you can death-stare the babbling culprit into submission. Failing this, change carriage, or use your voice even louder. But frantically scanning the on-board safety instructions to fling open the escape exit and then desperately launching yourself into the serene skies is not quite as logistically possible.

And I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t sit too comfortably in my reclined, leather-upholstered window seat knowing that my idle mobile prattle could potentially cause signal failure, skew avionics, detonate bombs and possibly prompt a crash worthy of a Hollywood summer blockbuster. On this note, research published last year by the British Civil Aviation Authority found that mobile phone signals distort navigation bearing displays by up to five degrees. Now my maths is not great, but couldn’t that mean ending up in San Antonio instead of St Tropez.

I am slightly comforted, albeit somewhat bemused, to hear that earlier this month the U.S. Federal Aviation Authority ruled that it would not allow mobile calls on planes for the foreseeable future.

The Daily Telegraph’s Charles Starmer Smith has even gone so far as to launch a campaign against in-flight mobile use to preserve passengers’ safety and sanity when their heads are in the clouds. But in such a technologically infatuated world and one in which phone companies will be charging up to £2 a minute, I do not think that any number of right-wing intellectuals will be able to stop the surge for hell on board.

If this fearsome proposal goes ahead, the present tranquillity of cruising 30,000 feet above the ground will be ruthlessly shattered by the Mobile Phone Mafia. Catatonia may want to re-release her chart-topping hit, “It’s all over the front page, you give me air rage,” and the OED might be tempted to add an entry for it.