Electronics In Flight — Danger Or Distraction? 532
another similar writes "IEEE Spectrum has a blog post revisiting the debate on whether electronic devices pose a risk to flight avionics spurred by a NY Post article about Arianna Huffington's refusal to power down her Blackberry during takeoff. The post points out the EU's removal of their own ban on cell phone use in 2007 and the likelihood of significant non-compliance daily in the US — and curiously, planes haven't been falling from the sky at a similar rate. While the potential exists for there to be a problem, it would appear the risk is low. Ever bent the rules? Is an app for landing commercial jets somewhere in our future?"
I would be very concerned (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I would be very concerned (Score:4, Insightful)
If a cell phone posed even minimal danger to air traffic then you'd be required to put them in with the hold luggage or surrender them to the airline staff for the duration of the flight. There is no danger.
Re:I would be very concerned (Score:5, Insightful)
Even so ... what happened to politeness and consideration for other passengers?
Crap (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a load of over-sensitive could-possibly-be-thought-might-happen crap. Like using a mobile phone in a petrol station - the risk is actually from dodgy, illegally imported batteries installed in such things which might "spark" if dropped, nothing to do with the phone itself somehow magically igniting vapours. Most petrol station fires are caused by static sparks from people re-entering their cars while they are fuelling (which in itself suggests inattention to the pump pushing litres of a flammable liquid at high speed into your car) or just plain carelessness (i.e. smoking on the forecourt).
At some point, there probably WAS a time it could interfere with a piece of equipment not designed to take account that mobile phones were nearby (even if that was just audible chirps being recorded on the cockpit tapes because the mics picked them up like mics tend to do with mobile phone "check-in" broadcasts). If you're seriously using planes which are not designed to cope with mobile phone transmissions now, you're in a serious breach of due diligence as regards safety and hazards. For a start, it's too easy to leave one on, whether in the hold, or the overhead compartments, or your pocket, or even the pilot's pocket, and secondly you are going to be flying OVER mobile phone masts (with a lot more power output) and getting very, very close to them and mobile phones whenever you come into land and taxi.
The mobile phone thing is most probably, as has been recorded in several of the EU discussions, more about radio licensing - because having lots of mobiles suddenly appear in the air can mess up OTHER things. Like I can join a ferry's maritime network but only when it's switched on when we're out at sea, not near the coast. In terms of safety, if a mobile phone, or even a thousand mobile phones, can interfere with the operation of an aircraft, then you have much more to worry about that mobile phones themselves. For a start, any transmitter, any static, any friction at all. Same for wireless, bluetooth, and anything else that operates on similar wavelengths. Hell, most aircraft that serve food have a microwave or similar heater on board - bet that churns out a million times more "Risk Assessment" than the pilot's mobile phone.
Re:I would be very concerned (Score:5, Insightful)
That has been long gone out the window...
I dread the day when cell phones are allowed in use on the plane. Can you immigine a 2 hour flight with some person yacking away the entire time getting loud and annoying... I still don't like to listen to other people phone conversations at a restaurant. You know the type...
What? The plane crashed? (Score:4, Insightful)
What? The plane crashed? I didn't notice. I was on my Blackberry. Neither did I notice the guy sitting next to me who was hitting me so I would get out of his way. I'm going to send him a nasty text message.
That's what a pilot told me too (Score:4, Insightful)
[...] one of the multiple reasons is passenger attention.
That's what a pilot told me too. If passengers are listening to music, for example, they won't hear announcements made on the speakers.
It's not that the inability to hear announcements is a direct threat to the safety of passengers. But it's one of those cases where you want to eliminate anything that can potentially make a bad situation become worse.
Most plane crashes, it seems to me, are caused by a combination of small incidents that—combined together—create a deadly situation. When reviewing those incidents, they never seem so serious if considered separately.
Re:I would be very concerned (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay, admit it. You're just making this stuff up now, aren't you?
It seems hard to believe that every third car in 1985 had voided their warranty when they installed a CB radio.
Re:I would be very concerned (Score:5, Insightful)
Spark gaps tend to put out some seriously gross, broad band, RF noise. A spark gap with the energy of a lighting bolt should be quite the RF emitter.
Unless the designers depend exclusively on the aircraft's outer skin for RF protection(which seems unlikely, given the systems that need to communicate and/or scan the outside world, which obviously can't be faraday-caged inside the outer skin...) they have presumably had to deal with RF of the sort that would make your weedy little powered-by-batteries-and-FCC-regulated widget wet itself.
Also one would sincerely hope, given what the higher level of cosmic ray exposure can(with low but nonzero frequency) do in terms of flipping bits in any circuitry that isn't rad-hard, critical systems would be redundant, watchdogged and quick to reboot, or both.
Obey the rule simply because its the rule (Score:4, Insightful)
There are many possible reasons why electronics of various types should be turned off, most of the covered by the discussion here. However, most importantly, THEY SHOULD BE TURNED OFF BECAUSE THE RULE IS TO TURN THEM OFF. That's right, I'm advocating obeying the rule just because there is a rule. Sounds like I'm some kind of wuss, huh?
We like to think that we are a nation of laws, not men (read about it here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_law [wikipedia.org] or here http://robertdfeinman.com/society/men_not_laws.html [robertdfeinman.com]. A fundamental premise of this is that everyone is supposed to obey the law. I'm sure everyone can cite examples where this is not so (police giving other police a pass for infractions, etc.) but in general it is a very useful and egalitarian way to order society. We order society so that society is possible. Without order there would be chaos. One way to order society is to have multiple classes of people - you know, the nobles and the peasants. There are some who feel that this is the rightful order of things. Others don't. In the United States, one of the basic premises of our society is that everyone follows the rules. Sure, we know its not always true. But the more we pursue the ideal, the greater the chance that we will come close to it.
I get aggravated every time I see someone flaunt their disrespect for the law, such as when driving in traffic. We've all seen someone cut to the head of a line, etc. Why do we get angry? Well, its not fair, for one thing. For another, most of us recognize that its extremely easy to break the law and we probably wouldn't get "caught" (i.e., punished by some enforcer of the law), but we obey it anyway. We are frustrated with those don't, in part because most of us are smart enough to realize that if we all disregarded those laws, we would have chaos. The rule breaking only works if a very few people do it. So those few people have anointed themselves as somehow being above the rest of us. Nothing is more sure to tick a person off then another person placing themselves above that first person, especially in a society that believes it is egalitarian.
So think about it the next time you are breaking a rule, probably because you think you know it is a harmless infraction. Who are you ticking off with your self-importance? How much are you encouraging others to also choose to bend/break a rule, perhaps one more important? How much are you contributing to disorder and chaos?
Most importantly, how much are you contributing to the kind of thinking exhibited by those like Ms. Huffington who obviously think that "rules are for the little people"?
Re:I would be very concerned (Score:4, Insightful)
The danger is that the device could cause interference with an on-board computer. It doesn't need to crash the airplane to be disruptive. Let's say that your iPhone caused the N2 reading for engine #3 to read 0 on takeoff - the pilot would think that the engine had failed and return to the airport for an emergency landing. Everyone would be deplaned and a ground crew would have to examine the engine for a couple of hours just to verify that everything was okay.
Now, let's say the chances of that happening are 1-in-100 million. Well, the level of disruption and the odds of it happening are so poor that a terrorist wouldn't bother. But there are around 100,000 commercial flights, planet-wide, per day. That would mean that every three years you would have an incident like this.
The price we pay to prevent this is that we don't use our electronics for the first 10 and last 20 minutes of flight and we don't use anything that transmits for the entire flight. Personally, I don't think it's that big of a deal.
Re:I would be very concerned (Score:5, Insightful)
> It will void your warranty of your car if you install a CB or amateur radio in it.
No it won't, unless you do something stupid like tap into an ignition line for power.
> Also, I know of people who's car will turn off when they transmit using their amateur radio.
The only ham I know who this happened to found out his radio was wired improperly and it was dumping the RF output of the amp into the car's chassis, which is supposed to act as an RF shield.
I've personally done car electronics testing for OEMs. Trust me, they test against everything they can think of. A single warranty recall to fix something they missed wipes out the profit margin for an entire vehicle run for a year or two.
> If a device where to send a signal on the frequencies these receivers receive, it could cause issues.
Which is why there are frequency bands, and all transmission devices have to be licensed by the FCC to only transmit on those bands. Besides which, aircraft radios should have superior out of band rejection as they are subject to higher levels of EMI/RFI than most electronics.
Think about it for a second. Airplanes can take direct lightning hits without falling out of the sky. That's an enormous, super-wide band, ultra-high amplitude blast of just about every kind of electromagnetic radiation point blank, and they fly along as if nothing happened. You seriously think a 500mW cell phone transmitter is going to cause problems?
Re:Obey the rule simply because its the rule (Score:5, Insightful)
The rule of law depends on those laws being just and reasonable. When it's not, the law becomes a tool of exploitation rather than protection. When this happens it is right, and just, and good that the law is disobeyed.
Not saying that this is one of those cases. Just saying that absolute adherence to the rule of law is dangerous.
Re:Obey the rule simply because its the rule (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Experience from an actual pilot (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree that there's a lot of ridiculous crap about cell phones starting fires at gas stations and things like that, but the fuel gauge event was real, and there are quite a few very similar events, leading to loss of radio reception and things like that. Airplane electronics are not as robust as people like to think. They break all the time even without interference.