The article that you mention (which I remember as well and also can't find) was basically saying how in theory a cellphone from a plane could hop from tower to tower much faster than they currently do if the user is in, say, a car, and that could cause some problems for the cell phone system.
I remember something along those lines as well, it has nothing to do with airline security and switching off electronic devices though. The issue here is that a 2G/3G device on a flying plane does reach a lot of cell towers simultaneously. The network is not designed for this, they pretty much assume that you're in reach of only a handful of towers at any given time - so the cell network could possibly be overloaded by thousands of people in the air trying to connect to many towers at once.
