> But IF its possible for law enforcement to ping your phone when its on standby, dont you think its possible that it can be pinged whilst on airplane mode too?

We do not need to wonder, because this is a physics problem and we have science. Radio waves are easy to measure. There have been plenty of experiments with putting phones in faraday chambers with SDRs proving a phone in airplane mode does not emit any cellular frequencies.

You could prove this yourself with cheap home equipment if you wished.

But also, implementing airplane mode that did not actually disable the baseband modem would be an outright violation of FCC law that would be noticed by curious members of the public if this was widespread.

That said a specific targeted device with backdoored software can just make the airplane mode button do nothing, to your point, so physical switches for the baseband are always best, though few devices support them.

Like I said, you keep ignoring wifi. If you dont want your device to be completely useless, you need to connect it somehow. Both Radio and Wifi are easily trackable, so to circle round to the original point turning off radio tracking on your device and 'turning it into a wifi tablet' does not stop you being tracked.

>so physical switches for the baseband are always best, though few devices support them.

If someone has the motivation to backdoor devices they can do the same with physical switches (that will still talk to software regardless). If anything adding a switch that does nothing is easier.

Easily verified with a multimeter and the most basic of electronics skills. Electronics are not magic.

The same applies to software tho so there really isn't any advantage outside of marketing