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Research: Mobile Phones Disrupt Aircraft
threeturn writes "Another contribution to the ever-popular "mobiles on planes" topic. Every time this is discussed on /. lots of people say "there is no danger - its just the airlines trying to make a buck on their skyphones". Well, now the UK Civil Aviation Authority has done some research which shows mobiles on planes do disrupt safety systems and interfere with compass readings and other navigation equipment. Also reported by the BBC. So do us all a favour and switch your mobiles off next time you fly."
Well, when it comes to airplanes and flying I think the expression "better safe than sorry" fits the bill quite nice.
The biggest problem when flying and using mobile phones is the phones themselves. When you are flying, the phone may try to communicate (roam) with many towers which causes cell network problems. Imagine the area of towers you could hit at 30,000ft in the sky.
Can anyone explain why apparantly 802.11b wireless connections do *not* pose a problem in planes?
My karma ran over your dogma
Seriously... the system as it stands couldn't be any more broken, as it depends for its safe operation on the active opting-out of every cell carrying passenger. I mean, phones ring in college lectures all the time -- I've seen it happen to professors who have very clear policies about turning them off.
Granted, it takes the airlines forever to agree to small safety changes like, oh, I don't know... Installing non-flammable seat cushions?!? I guess we can't really expect too much in the way of retrofits, particularly in today's economic climate.
We bail 'em out, they waste it, we'll just bail 'em out again.
It was a joke! When you give me that look it was a joke.
...using your cellphone on board an aircraft is a Bad Idea. Even if you disregard the safety issues, there's another issue: the cellphone system depends on each phone being seen by a small number of cell sites. This works fine on the ground, but at 37,000 feet, one cellphone can activate literally hundreds of sites. The cellular network cannot deal well with this situation.
The cell network can, however, detect this condition, and report the number of a phone that's on use in the air (by the sheer number of sites it talks to). The FCC has issued fines before to people who have used their cellphones inflight. Want a fine? Then turn yours on.
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
The applied interference field strengths were up to 50 volts/metre for a single frequency, and 35 volts/metre for dual frequencies.
ok now how about running the same test with REALISTIC amplitudes... no cellphone on this planet can generate 50V per Meter.
Cripes, my ham gear transmitting at 25 watts is only at 11 volts per meter as measured by a field strength meter...
Sheesh I might as well report that cellphones make cars unsafe because when I put the car's computer in my microwave oven and set it for 10 minutes the electronics fry out..
Call me when they perform a real test.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You are right of course, but this is why the danger exists. Many aircraft have been certified with way-back technology, and it doesn't pay to re-certify these airliners with hot, new goodies that are designed to live in peace with mobile phones and other wireless toys.
Avionics system designs are very conservative, it's all designed to work forever. Latest-and-greatest simply doesn't fit their books. With the track record of modern software, I don't think we should be sorry for that..
Besides the danger to the aircraft, the mobile networks are also not designed to handle mobile phones moving between cells at 500mph and 'visible' to every cell in a 100 mile radius.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
When all the redundant power in an airplane fails, the hydralics and compass will still work. The pilots don't use the compass much whent he much more advanced electirc systems are working. So when the plane is hit but lightning (or something else which takes the power out) the pilot really needs the compass to know which way to go, and just then, every joey on the plane fires up his cell phone and the compass goes haywire.
I'm a private pilot, and I always thought the reason cell phone usage was restricted wasn't interferance (on a clear day, you don't need any electronics in the plane, just spark to the plugs) I thought it was becuase the massivly increased range of the phone screws up the cell to cell protocol.
M@
Krispy Cream is people
I'll second that.
Having read the article, there are some interesting points. First off they aren't alleging that using your cellphone will make the plane crash, but rather that it might cause some sort of distracting noise in the crews headsets and at worst could conceivably cause a false alarm on one of their warning lights. Sounds a little iffy to me, but ok, better safe than sorry on a plane... then I read on.
Turns out it doesn't matter on new jets - only ones certified pre-'89. So why don't they let people use their mobiles on the newer planes where it's not an issue? Back to the old 'conspiracy theories' on that one. Controllers like control. And the high prices on the sky phones can't hurt either.
Plus, as you kind of hinted at, if a cellphone can really cause even minor systems disruption on a pre-'89 jet, just imagine what someone that was seriously trying to cause a problem could do. It's absurd. If those jets really do have systems that can be so easily disrupted, they should be grounded until they're fixed. So either way, something doesn't add up here, either they're lying (or maybe just stretching the truth very far and very consciously) or they're not even trying to do their job, take your pick.
In an age when we know there are people trying to bring jetliners down, it's absolutely absurd to be flying jetliners that are so poorly insulated against EM interference that a mobile phone is a threat to them. Period.
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Clearly they need to install shielding
Much easier said than done! There are miles of wire. Any break in the shielding can be enough to cause problems. Any corrosion can too.
Furthermore, the phone can cause interference by other processes, for example:
Your phone starts transmitting. It is at high power because it is hearing a weak signal. It's signal gets into your walkman via the headphone cable. Another signal, perhaps from a radio on the aircraft or another cell phone or whatever, also gets into that same cable. The two mix because the walkman is non-linear at those frequencies. The result is on the radio communications frequency, the ILS (Instrument Landing System) frequency, or GPS band.
In general, this whole thing is about incrementally improving safety. The odds of a single cell phone on a single flight causing a crash are very low. But the odds get much larger when you are talking millions of cell phones on hundreds of thousands of flights.
Even then, the cell phone may just *contribute* to an accident. Most commercial air crashes are a result of a cascade of individually recoverable failures or events. The cell phone may simply take out a backup system at a critical time, or it may interfere with a primary system (say, glideslope) while the pilot is distracted by another urgency.
For those who comment about how the presumably more susceptible legacy systems on the aircraft should be replaced... the systems mentioned include such minor systems as the only air-to-ground communications mechanism used for air traffic control, and the only instrument landing system available for many airports. Replacing this "legacy" infrastructure would require replacing every aircraft radio in every aircraft, control tower, air traffic center, etc in the world, and replacing all of the Instrument Landing Systems.
This is not trivial. Furthermore, in aircraft, it is not a good idea to rapidly replace systems that have been working and safe!
The only good weather is bad weather.
What about the cumulative effect of a hundred phones at once? If you don't ban them, then almost all passengers will leave them on.
I'm not sure if this really matters or not.... I'm asking.
plus-good, double-plus-good
It all came to me on 9/11, when I was watching the news. I'm a frequent flyer, so I know all about how they say you can't use your phone, disrupts frequencies, magnetic fields, blah blah blah...
But on the news, here's what they said that stuck in my mind. When the planes hit, Prez Bush was in the air on Air Force One. Security immediately went back to the press corps who were also on Air Force One and said turn OFF your cellphones NOW, we don't want anyone to be able to track us by the cellphones.
So ok, the MOST IMPORTANT PLANE IN THE COUNTRY can afford to have a press corps full of cellphones on during flight, but the plane I'm on is going to crash and burn if there's even one?
Riiiiight..