Reply #15: This seems to confirm what I posted above: [View All]

[Devils Advocate NZ]

As you approach a larger city, such as Chicago, you now illuminate, say
120 or more cellsites, with almost equal intensity. One phone in the
air may cause hundreds of calls to drop on the ground for the above
reasons. Also when you hit "SEND" and initiate a call, you have
a bunch of cellsites all hearing you on the same control channel (impossible
on the ground), and all feeding into the same cellular switch, causing
confusion or maybe even crashing the switch. I never used a cell phone in the
air even close to Chicago for the above reason. My "testing" over Indianapolis
was done before they were big enough to reuse frequencies (I checked first)

Perhaps cell systems have been updated to look for such flooding and disconnect the source before it overloads the system, thus making conversations in high flying airliners impossible?

Doesn't look good for my hypothesis though. :-)