How can I turn off the radio devices in my laptop to ensure the plane I'm flying on doesn't crash and kill us all?

Question

I have an EEE 1000H netbook. It's running Arch Linux. I need to know how to turn off the Bluetooth and WiFi cards to ensure they don't crash my plane...

There's two ways I'm thinking of to do this. Either boot up into Arch and turn them off from there or, to be paranoid, I'll boot up into BIOS and turn the hardware off.

Am I missing anything? How have you EEE owners handled this?

I'd like to not have the news headlines report of a plane crash because some idiot didn't turn off their netbook.

Answer 1

$ exec sudo shutdown -h now

Answer 2

I've no experience with bluetooth, but I believe that sudo ifdown wlan0 does the trick to turn the wifi off, assuming you're NOT using NetworkManager (if you are, the interface will shut off, but things go screwy once NetworkManager realizes it's off).

sudo service NetworkManager stop or sudo /etc/init.d/NetworkManager stop stops the NetworkManager service, which sometimes turns off the wireless card, as well. If it doesn't, proceed with ifdown wlan0.

Finally, this answer is for completeness's sake; I hold with the opinions of the commenters, that being that wifi and bluetooth are unlikely to send your airplane into a nosedive. Unless you're the PHB, that is.