Disable Windows 10 Airplane Mode Group Policy (keyboard shortcuts, and settings)

[afterfreeze]

Good Afternoon!

DISCLAIMER: My environment does not use Windows 8, nor does it utilize windows Tablets, or Windows Mobile Devices, And I wouldn't be surprised if this fix interfered with any apps that need to modify wireless settings on those devices, and I don't know if this will work on Windows 8 (it probably will, but as I haven't tested it, I make no guarantees!)

 

In my situation, I piloted an Active Learning Space here at UCSD with our first set of laptops in a college learning lab utilizing only wireless connectivity, so when a student enables airplane mode and logs off, I have to go down and log in with a local administrative account, and disable airplane mode.

After repeated instances of this, I searched the internet far and wide, and only came across GPO's that would disable the hardware switch on specific machines.

So I did what any good IT insomniac does, and I exported the entire registry for a few windows 10 machines and parsed them for airplane mode related settings.

 

Here is what I ended up with:

If you disable the "Radio Management Service" (RmSvc) in services.msc, you can no longer change the state of airplane mode.

But there are a few catches here...

First, if the machine already has Airplane mode enabled, you won't be able to disable it after the service is stopped.

Also, The service can't be stopped while Windows is running, so you have to set the service startup to disabled, and then reboot to see the effects take place.

From a GPO Standpoint, if you go to Computer Configuration>Preferences>Control Panel Settings>Services and then select "RmSvc" (Radio Management Service) and change the startup setting to disabled, you have effectively killed Airplane mode once the GPO is applied (APPLIED, NOT JUST ASSIGNED) to the machine and and the machine is rebooted.

This fix may have unintended consequences with other windows features, but none have appeared so far in my environment.

 

Implementing this effectively Disables the ability to change airplane mode from the following places:

The Keyboard shortcut. (generally Fn+F12)

The Network Icon on the task-bar. (Airplane Mode button still appears, but clicking it does nothing)

Windows Settings. (The Option to enable Airplane mode is Greyed out)

 

I hope this helps!

[simpsonj]

Apologies for the necro thread raising, but after an hour or so of head desk dealing with a 0x80070005 error message, I finally found the solution.

 

Using either Server 2016/2019 or RSAT on Windows 10, Create a GPO in Computer Configuration - Windows Settings - Security Settings - System Services and change the Radio Management Service from there, instead of using GPP.

 

Now to find a way of disabling clicking the WiFi button and turning WiFi off that way...

[DavR]

Nice! I'd missed this first time round, so thanks for the updated method.

 

An alternative method we'd been using on our Dell laptops was to use group policy to prevent the installation of the hardware switch on the case....

[simpsonj]

On our dell's the switch is disabled in BIOS where possible, uninstalled in device manager where not.

 

The above prevents airplane mode being turned on via the WiFi icon, either on the logon screen, or when logged on.

 

Ideally I would prevent WiFi being turned off at all, but as a workaround I've disabled students from having access to Network Icon in the System Tray, and the Notifications and Action Center. Fingers crossed it cuts down on the number of 'this laptop is broken' complaints!

[DavR]

Yup, just added this to our policy and tested - nice one