Time to Review FAA Gadget Policies 292
Nick Bilton, Lead Technology writer for The New York Times Bits Blog, called the FAA to complain about its gadget policies on flights and got an unexpected reply. Laura J. Brown, deputy assistant administrator for public affairs, said that it might be time to change some of those policies and promised they'd take a “fresh look” at the use of personal electronics on planes. From the article: "Yes, you read that correctly. The F.A.A., which in the past has essentially said, 'No, because I said so,' is going to explore testing e-readers, tablets and certain other gadgets on planes. The last time this testing was done was 2006, long before iPads and most e-readers existed. (The bad, or good, news: The F.A.A. doesn’t yet want to include the 150 million smartphones in this revision.)"
Re:About time common sense prevailed! (Score:5, Informative)
The reason you should not be reading your kindle, or have a laptop out during takeoff and landing, or any reasonably hard-edged, dense object is that it has the potential to become a projectile upon sudden deceleration. The less crap raining horizontally through the cabin upon impact, the better the chances of survivability.
Re:It isn't the FAA that said "No, because I said (Score:4, Informative)
In small planes you certainly do, I've talked on a cell phone from within a cessna, and many headsets designed for small aircraft have bluetooth to connect to your cell phone (older ones had connectors for the wired jack on cell phones) so that you can talk on your cell phone despite the loud environment.
When I last flew on a military aircraft the flight engineer was talking on his cell phone to communicate with the rescue coordination centre when the HF radio failed.
Cell towers do aim somewhat downward, but at altitude you have nothing to block your signal, so they often work anyway.
That said, if cell phones were permitted on planes, you can bet the wireless carriers would rush to sign contracts to install small cell sites inside the planes. works better with their network, and you can bet they'd find a way to add a premium "airplane roaming charge" of some form.
In a perfect world I'd like to see it where you are allowed to use your cell phone all you want on a plane, as long as you don't talk on it. Texting and data are fine, but please don't chat on your phone for the whole flight, out of courtesy to the rest of the passengers!
Re:About time common sense prevailed! (Score:5, Informative)
NASA anonymous reporting system.... "So what would you think if you were the B777 pilot who's radio communication with air traffic control was interrupted by a passenger's cell phone call? Or if you were the captain in command of a B747 that unexpectedly lost autopilot after takeoff and did not get it back until 4, count 'em four passengers turned off their portable electronic devices?" http://christinenegroni.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/handhelds-on-airplanes-bigger-problem.html [blogspot.co.uk]
"In 2007, one pilot recounted an instance when the navigational equipment on his Boeing 737 had failed after takeoff. A flight attendant told a passenger to turn off a hand-held GPS device and the problem on the flight deck went away." http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/business/18devices.html [nytimes.com]
Re:What's so bad about their policies? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:About time common sense prevailed! (Score:5, Informative)
Radio communication with ATC is an analog band just above FM radio, and involves shielded cables running from a shielded radio to one or more antennas located outside the body of the aircraft (which is a Faraday cage at those frequencies unless one of the doors is open, and probably even then).
Based on that, I'd rate the odds of a cell phone call interfering with an ATC call just south of the odds of getting hit by a meteor while dancing the Macarena. Actually, scratch that. It's more like the odds of dancing the Macarena creating a statistically significant increase in your risk of getting hit by a meteor.
The problem with using incident reports as a means of determining whether something is safe or not is that correlation is not causation. The fact that the autopilot came back online after four people shut off their laptops does not mean that those laptops caused the failure. It means that the autopilot came back on after those laptops were disabled. In much the same way, it rained in the SF Bay Area after I used the bathroom this morning, so obviously my toilet causes rain.... It's a lot more likely that the autopilot kicked out due to a transient problem in some sensor, a frozen pitot tube that thawed out, a power surge that caused a self-resetting circuit interruptor to temporarily shut off power to a critical piece of equipment, or some other temporary problem that went away on its own.
However, it is human nature to look for and see patterns even when they don't exist. Thus, after years of being told that electronics can cause planes to misbehave, people immediately assume that somebody's MP3 player is at fault whenever something unexplainable happens on an aircraft. The flight crew tells people to shut down their electronics. After a while, things start working again, so the flight crew then assumes that those electronics caused the problem when the evidence supporting that conclusion is flimsy at best and nonexistent at worst. That doesn't prevent it from being reported as an incident, though.
If you really want useful data, the flight crew needs to tell those passengers to turn that equipment back on and see if the problem recurs. If it does, then it probably contributed to the problem. If it does not, it probably did not. The problem is that nobody wants to do this because they're too afraid that turning it back on might bring the plane down. And this is why incident reports are nearly useless as a means of determining safety.
Re:The other side of the story (Score:3, Informative)
FAA did testing years ago when they grounded planes and found that all planes are and have been properly shielded for *quite* some time.
How do I know? my work did the testing and results came back and basically confirmed it.
Re:Familiar territory (Score:5, Informative)
Dude, it has nothing to do with terrorists. Where did you even get that idea from?
The reason is this: statistically speaking, altitudes below 10,000 feet are far more dangerous than higher altitudes. Most accidents occur during takeoff/landing and given that transponders are not required below 10,000 unless within controlled airspace and/or within a Mode C veil, it makes the lower altitudes a fairly dangerous area. Hence why Personal Electronic Devices (PEDs) are prohibited below 10,000 feet and sterile cockpit procedures are enforced any time the aircraft is below 10,000 feet.
Why then can passengers continue to listen to music and watch TV through the aircraft's on-board entertainment system at altitudes below 10,000 feet? The answer is that all of those systems have a built-in feature that disables (pauses, mutes, etc) them when a PA is made. PEDs do not have that ability which is why they are prohibited below 10,000 feet.
Read Advisory Circular 91-21.1B (specifically states that the FCC mandates the ban on using mobile phones while airborne), 14 CFR 121.306, and 14 CFR 121.542(c) for further information.
Re:The other side of the story (Score:5, Informative)
Well, I am not sure what you are talking about when you mention the EM radiation from your watch. That should either be essentially zero, in the case of an analog watch, or... well still essentially zero, if you are talking about an LCD watch. Unless you have a fancy "smart watch" which plays MP3s or something... I don't think anyone claimed a plane was vulnerable to less radiation than your watch puts out.
That said, since some devices can and do cause interference, the default should be "don't allow", and then certain devices (or even classes of devices) can be allowed after extensive testing. The onboard microwave, you can be sure, received many many hours of testing, and is probably a special model, with special shielding. They also control when and how it is operated. For example, let's say the GPS goes out every time the microwave is run - they know how to restore it if needed, and they know why it is out. If that kind of thing happens randomly and uncontrollably due to some combination of consumer devices, that's a different situation.
Lightning bolts have a tremendous amount of energy, but are very, very brief. Other than creating some static on analog radio communications, they don't usually cause much interference. (Unless they strike you, then they can cause circuit failure).
Radio stations are a known quantity, since they are pretty much always operating in the same locations, frequencies, and power levels. The airplane is also so far away from them most of the time, that the power level is very low. A much weaker signal (like the WiFi from my laptop) can be much stronger in the interior of airplane, given that it's much closer. Also, let's not forget that the airplane is a metal box, it blocks out outside signals for the most part, and keeps inside signals bouncing around longer.
Re:The other side of the story (Score:5, Informative)
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration collects reports from pilots of incidents related to electronic devices. Of 50 incidents in the most recent report check from last year, few had anything to do with cockpit interference. Mostly it was reports of people who simply didn’t turn off their device or laptop batteries overheating, not of any kind of interference from those devices.
Those incidents that were related to the plane’s avionics were purely speculation. For example, in one report, a fuel gauge on a Boeing 757 was not working properly during takeoff, but began working again when the plane was landing. The report says the pilot “suspects” a possible electronic device on the plane caused the interference. The pilot admitted he did not do any testing.
In other words, there is absolutely zero evidence that the device is a cause of interference. There are, of course, numerous examples of pilots claiming they caused interference, with no scientific evidence ever backing up those claims (I am, in fact, not aware of any such scientific results whatsoever.) Remember, correlation != causation... and every all the instances of interference is anecdotal and correlative at best. If the devices cause interference, than you should be able to replicate it scientifically. Until someone does, I'm calling it BS.
Re:The other side of the story (Score:5, Informative)
It's a bit difficult to find the information on how many flights there are in the US per year, but this article [bts.gov] states that in 2004 there were 6,830,000 airplane flights in the US. I'm going to use an even smaller number - 5,000,000 - as a baseline.
In 7 years - 35,000,000 flights - we have had something go wrong due to said devices 75 times, or around 0.000214% of the time. Is it really worth inconveniencing everyone when the number is that remote?
Re:The other side of the story (Score:4, Informative)
Interference on 121.5 wont affect much. 95% of the traffic on that freq is people telling other people they are accidentally transmitting on guard.
The real issue is 108-112 MHz is the frequency band localizers broadcast on (the lateral part of instrument landing systems, the vertical is up somewhere in the 300's MHz), and 112-118 MHz is VOR navigation. Most people these day are flying GPS and not VOR, but they will be on the localizer when landing in low visibility. Not too many airlines can use RNAV afaik. If an oscillator is adding 10.7 Mhz, then anyone listening to an FM station around 97-102 MHz would put them in the right range for interfering with the localizer signal.