Britain's CAA Considers Laptop Ban on Commercial Aircraft

hayb writes "An article in Britain's The Register claims that NASA and United Airlines have conducted tests on various aircraft and have found that ultra-wideband (UWB) devices "knocked out" collision-avoidance systems and impaired instrument landing systems. It states that the blanket ban on all devices in necessary because flight crews do not have the knowledge to differentiate between standard notebooks and ones with UWB devices."

Comments

Re:I'm not scared of flying..

[Sycraft-fu]

"The fact that accidents don't happen more often than they actually do must be considered an engineering miracle."

No, it's considered GOOD engineering. Believe it or not most of the high paid safety engineers that work on these things are not people that just assume that nothing bad will happen. Quite the opposite, they assume EVERYTHING bad will happen, and engineer for that. There are backups, failsafes, etc, etc. That, and the planes are checked and serviced all the time to ensure that all those systems are working as they should.

The airline construction industry is NOT the comptuer industry, they don't jsut slap something together and see how it works in the real world. They design and test, and test, and test, and test.

It takes a long time for a plane to be fully designed and tested, they have plenty of redundancy, and they are contiunally checked for failures. It is no miracle they don't fail often, it is good design and matenence.