I've had several relatives flying on Alitalia recently and experiences have been mixed. The best scenario is if Delta or another carrier has chartered the flight, in which case the rules are sensible and other than take-off and landing any device other than cell phones are allowed. If it's an actual Alitalia flight, it appears to be completely at the whim of the flight attendants. I wonder if a small token would get them to permit you to use a DAP or DVD player, since it's apparently up to them to take it to the Captain, if needed. I'll be using them in about 2 weeks so I'll post my own experience after that, but I'm not hopeful since it's not a chartered flight. I don't have a PSP, but I'm not sure these people will be able to tell the difference between that device and my old Zodiac 2. I assume that will be banned right away, solid state or not and same for any Gameboys in my group. Of course it makes no sense to anyone with working brain cells to allow the use of a PC, using either hard drive or CD/DVD, but not a solid state MP3 player. No doubt they'd object to my little iRiver Clix since it can receive FM radio, no doubt a major hazard to navigational beacons! So I'll just keep it in my pocket. It infuriates me to have to behave like a 5-year-old sneaking sweets but it's either that or a very long trans-Atlantic flight. As a sidenote, both parties who've recently used this airline report they are far from being full, no doubt this inane policy is part of the reason for that. At least I hope to have more legroom than usual. Also funny to me is that I recently saw an episode of 'Mythbusters' in the US where they thoroughly debunked the idea of any device that doesn't transmit a signal causing problems with avionics, and even cell phones only rarely (and with effort on their part) managed to give a very fleeting interference with a nav-beacon signal. If I thought it would help I'd send a copy to Alitalia, but I doubt that it would change anything.
