With U.S. aviation officials poised to lift their longstanding ban on cellphone use in commercial airliners, such is most decidedly not the case in China.

From a website with which I was previously unfamiliar called ChinaSMACK:

Beijing Times report — While on a flight from Changchun to Beijing, Yu X used her mobile phone to make calls multiple times. Not only did she ignore flight attendants who asked her to stop, she also exhibited a nasty attitude refusing to turn off her phone. After the plane landed, she was summoned to the police station. At present, Yu X has been given an administrative punishment of 5 days detention by the airport police.

The English translation of the Beijing Times story is choppy at best, though it appears to quote an Air China official talking about the alleged danger of passenger phone use disrupting flight instruments, which has been so widely debunked on this side of the world that it’s the airlines themselves clamoring for the phone-use ban to be lifted.

As for the “nasty” passenger who reportedly received five days in the cooler, there was no mention of whether she was allowed to use her phone while detaine