Turn Airplane Mode on/off via terminal

Running the following command in terminal:

gnome-control-center network

will open a window for network management which should be similar with:

You can observe that at this moment the "Airplane Mode" is off and the wireless is on.

Now, without to close this window, run the following command in terminal:

nmcli nm wifi off

The above window will be changed automatically to:

As you can see, now "Airplane Mode" is on and the wireless is off.

Running, again in terminal, the following command:

nmcli nm wifi off

will turn "Airplane Mode" off and wireless on again.

So, you don't need rfkill (which need also root privileges) to toggle "Airplane Mode" via terminal.

nmcli (see also man nmcli) it's enough and can be executed by any usual user... You don't need root privileges to climb in an airplane :)).

For Ubuntu 18.04:

nmcli r wifi on turns airplane mode off, and the converse sets it on.

A simple bash script to toggle airplane mode on or off is below; save it to file and set its execute bit in properties.

#!/bin/bash
wifi="$(nmcli r wifi | awk 'FNR = 2 {print $1}')"
if [ "$wifi" == "enabled" ] 
then
    nmcli r wifi off
else
    nmcli r wifi on
fi

Tested on 20.04.1 LTS. Let's disable all radio transmissions:

rudy@nbu130-rudy:~/bin$ pwd
/home/rudy/bin

rudy@nbu130-rudy:~/bin$ ./airplane_toggle 

rudy@nbu130-rudy:~/bin$ nmcli radio all 
WIFI-HW  WIFI     WWAN-HW  WWAN    
enabled  enabled  enabled  enabled 

rudy@nbu130-rudy:~/bin$ ./airplane_toggle 

rudy@nbu130-rudy:~/bin$ nmcli radio all 
WIFI-HW  WIFI      WWAN-HW  WWAN     
enabled  disabled  enabled  disabled 

rudy@nbu130-rudy:~/bin$ cat airplane_toggle 
#!/bin/bash
radio="$(nmcli radio all | awk 'FNR == 2 {print $2}')"
if [ "$radio" == "enabled" ]
 then
  nmcli radio all off
else
 nmcli radio all on
fi

It is even possible to assign the command '/home/rudy/bin/airplane_toggle' to a shortcut (tested).