Dear iOS & Android,

Please fix this garbage.

How impossibly stupid is it that the only time that you are ever—EVER—explicitly told that you can’t use your phone’s Airplane Mode is when you’re actually sitting on an airplane?

“Airplane Mode is not enough; your phones have to be turned all the way off,” says every poor flight attendant across the entire country, for every flight, every day, as planes are preparing for takeoff.

Look, I get why this setting is secretly brilliant. Modern smartphones depend on a steady signal connection in order to update mountains of inane app updates, tweets, emails, whatever. When this connection is lost, the phones are designed to exhaust all effort possible to reestablish connection—which is fine if you’ve, say, stepped into an elevator and you’re in the middle of a thing. But it’s a battery-crippling disaster if you’re somewhere like an airplane. Airplane Mode turns off most of the signal transmitting functions while still affording people the opportunity to keep their phone on so they play Angry Birds or whatever the hell.

You have to fix this.

See, I can’t blame the users here. You’ve clearly designed this feature to give them the impression that it’s acceptable for use on airplanes—there’s that neat little airplane logo that you utilize, and the whole using the word “Airplane” in the name thing. People have been trained for millenia to pick up on those sorts of signals. I think it’s perfectly reasonable for an average consumer to conclude that Airplane Mode is an appropriate alternative for the flight attendants’ hopeless “turn all your stuff off, for the love of god, I’m begging you” plea.

I’m certainly not asking the airline people for help. They’ve demonstrated sufficient evidence of significant mental trauma already. That’d be a hopeless endeavor. So it’s you guys.

I don’t want to ask for much. For sure, you all might be able to invent a smarter algorithm for checking data signals. But that sounds like a lot of work, and I’m not technologically sophisticated enough to make a sound recommendation here. So how about this: Turn your airplane logos into traincar images, and re-brand your feature as “Subway Mode.”

Thanks.

(One first-world problem down, infinity to go.)