Bad service on parked planes becomes a useful parable for thinking about the overlapping promises of mobile technology and commercial flight. You want to think of yourself as standing at the center of the travel experience: it’s your journey, your life, your social-media posts. But complex infrastructure and collective behaviors make the whole enterprise chug along. To provide maximum service to users, carriers oversupply the airport concourses, but at the expense of the tarmac areas that fall just out of reception zone for the terminal antennae, which are also just a bit too far from nearby cell towers. It’s a compromise in service of a larger (if imperfect) arrangement.

When cell signals go dark on the plane after boarding, it’s a low-grade reminder of how air travel is woven into people’s lives on the ground. Landing passengers need to communicate with family, friends, or drivers arriving for pickup; urgent work tasks may need attending to. An ongoing “searching” icon can be infuriating. It seems like these are two separate realms and they should connect more discretely, yet also seamlessly. But the truth is, flight is always messily entangled with infrastructure on the ground.

That’s an anxiety that pervades airports, places where connections of all kinds get made and broken. There’s a reason the China Philharmonic Orchestra staged a flash performance at Beijing Capital International Airport in February: It was sure to be captured by phone and shared online, thanks to saturated DAS antennae. The recent Hong Kong airport protests were effective because they interrupted the traffic (and thus economic) flows around the huge site—but just as much because these interruptions were disseminated via smartphones. When Newark airport was suddenly and terrifyingly evacuated in September, the chaotic scene was uncanny not just for what it was (or wasn’t), but for how it quickly dominated social-media feeds far beyond the New York region. Live shooters and terrorists preoccupy Americans’ minds, and the airport was ready-made for an incident of this type.

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Everyone is on edge at the airport. Will I make my flight? Am I a bad parent for traveling to make a living? Can I afford this vacation? That makes it even more irritating when something seemingly simple, like mobile coverage, breaks down. But maybe the uncertainty causes most of the anxiety. Flyers are worried about what they cannot control. In the face of ignorance, any knowledge is a comfort: You’re definitely going to miss your connection; or you saw your bag being loaded onto the plane.

When the specter of bad coverage takes your pre- or post-flight calls and app updates out of commission, take it as another new certainty: There’s nothing you can do but wait. It’s not about you anymore, but an accident of infrastructure. Flyers might take this moment as a chance to feel humility rather than self-centered frustration. Look around, and appreciate the complexity of the system at work. Appreciate that it works as well as it does, most of the time. Instead of searching for a cell signal (or an email, or an Instagram update), look for a signal of a different kind. Everything’s going to be okay—and, for now, there’s nothing you can do about it anyway.