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Risk Management For Electronics on Aircraft
Phronesis writes "M. Granger Morgan and his graduate student Bill Strauss have a nice article in Issues in Science and Technology about the risks posed by electronic devices in flight. Unlike most articles on the subject, this one neither pooh-poohs the risks ('We have estimated that reported events are occurring at a rate of about 15 and perhaps as many as 25 per year') nor exaggerates them ('RF interference from consumer electronics is unlikely to have figured in more than a few percent of commercial air accidents, if any at all, during the past 10 years.'). Instead, it presents a sensible plan for dealing with the risks that will accompany the inevitable expansion of the range of electronic devices passengers will use in flight, including cell phones and wireless computer networking."
Do airlines that require all mobile phones to be switched off allow exceptions for some new phones such as the Sony-Erikson P800 which provide a non-cellular Airline mode?
Disclaimer: The above comment was made while under the influence of too much coding and not enough sleep.
Probably the most useful recommendation in this article is the following:
Developing and deploying simple real-time tools to help flight crews detect RF emissions. If airline cabins were equipped with RF detectors, then flight crews could take corrective action when strong electromagnetic emissions occurred. The utility of equipping flight crews with easy-to-use hand-held RF detectors also warrants investigation.
Flight crews could be equipped with handheld RF detectors relatively quickly, which would not only help enforce existing FAA rules regarding inflight use of passenger electronics, but also help gather data that could form the basis of more long-term solutions.
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Not only in-flight risks, but all types are discussed here. It's one of the more lucid discussions on the net. I've been following this newsgroup for the better part of 20 years.
RF interference stories occur once every little while, and I hope this finally shuts up the people who say, "my cell phone couldn't possibly crash a plane, the greedy airline just wants me to use their satphone".
It's true that your cell phone, BY ITSELF, will not cause the plane to explode and shower the countryside with flaming wreckage. However, look at any airline accident in the last ten years or so. In almost every case, a sequence of one-in-a-million flukes comes together at exactly the wrong time to cause a crash. In the article, they cite probable cases where RF interference caused the airplane to fly slightly off course, or caused errors in the flight controls. If something like that happened at exactly the wrong time, YOU BET there would be an accident, and your cellphone would be to blame.
I'm all for paranoia in the airline industry. It's what makes the flight safer than the drive to the airport.
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The FAA specifies that, "no person may operate...any portable electronic device on any...aircraft" unless an airline has determined that use of the device "will not cause interference with the navigation or communication system of the aircraft on which it is to be used."
One has to wonder if any airline has tested whether pacemakers can cause interference?
Disclaimer: The above comment was made while under the influence of too much coding and not enough sleep.
I work as a consultant for an airline, and thus post anonymously :)
:-)
I know that an Airbus once had to restart all the control systems in the air, one by one, to get below 8000 feet. Before the restart, the plane's controls wouldn't let the pilot get below 8000 feet. If I had been the pilot, I'd demand some R&R after landing.
However, I'd like to see some sort of official ruling stating exactly which devices can and can't be operated at certain points during the flight. Ideally, this would apply internationally, too (though I'm not sure how that would be regulated, since the FAA has little jurisdiction internationally). I find extremely frustrating when one airline says a device is ok, and another does not. For example, I brough my portable CD player on a flight (a 13 hour flight) and was told I could not use it, because it would interfere with the aircraft's systems. This was on a relatively new 747-400. This was rather annoying, since on the same type of aircraft, 6 months prior to this, a different airline specifically said portable CD players (and tape players, etc) were ok.
Ideally, the FCC, or UL, or some organization could put a little marking on the back of any electronic device to designate whether or not it is acceptable to use during flight. For example, it could be a letter system where "A" indicates that it may never be used (ie: tesla coil); "B" indicates it may be used at any time (digital watch/PDA), "C" indicate it may be used except during takeoff/landing (ie: walkman). Then, instead of having to explain to the stewardess that your PDA does not transmit any RF signals, they could simply look at the back, see the letter "C", and go on their way.
Inconsistency in general (security checkpoints (before the TSA), airline policies, etc) is one of the most frustrating things to me as an airline traveler, and a policy like this could help solve the problem of being able to use my Palm Pilot on one airline, but not other.
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Kapton Wiring - The Silent Meanace
TWA warning
If you can detect my electronic device, please feel free to ask me to turn it off. If you can't - or won't - put a $50 detector in a $5 million aircraft, don't then try and tell me that you're as worried by stray RF as you are by Nelly Nicotene smoking in the toilets.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
God, I hope not. On Amtrak, nowadays, you get five hours of everyone around you shouting into their phones*. It's a blessing that planes ban them -- I shudder to think what a cross-continent flight would be like with phones allowed. Besides, as someone else said, they have a nice revenue source from they phones that they don't want to cut into.
* Mostly illustrating how utterly pointless their jobs are: "Mary? Mary? It's Bill! I'm on the train! Could you call Jeff and ask him if he got the fax Linda faxed to me? Call me back!" If anything, there seems to be too little white-collar unemployment.
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The article states that RF devices may induce currents in airplane wiring. I'm not sure how much commercial airliners cost, but I know it's probably well over 50 million. How much would it cost to use fiber optics instead of twisted-pair wiring? I'm sure relative to the cost of the airplane, it wouldn't be much, and that would eliminate having interference with the wires that must be run throughout the aircraft.
I don't know how much of the concern has to do with the computers themselves recieving interference, but I don't think it's that much. People use cell phones around computers all the time, and I don't think it causes any problems.
The only problem left then is potential interference with airplane navagation and communication systems. Again, the most critical times are when it's closest to the ground (takeoff and landing), but in those environments, I'd expect there to be a lot of cell phone usage by people in the airport, and that would (probably) cause as much interference as people in the plane.
The pilots and flight attendants that are blaming malfunctions on passenger RF interference aren't qualified to talk about it. They say "plane is having problems, passenger is using laptop, therefore laptop is causing problems". They don't have a clue what does and doesn't cause interference, and you'd have to get someone who knows the subject to tell me that that's the case before I'll believe it.
This is really silly. We should be testing the avionics of planes to see if they can take RF of the differing frequencies that could bother it. If it can't, the plane should be grounded until it can be hardened to handle the RF. RF hardening is a science that the military industrial complex is quite apt at. "That's expensive, why don't we BAN USE OF the devices," cry the economically minded. In a day an age where you're in deep crap if you forget to take your pocket knife off a keychain, its quite possible to bring a laptop on a plane that can fake signals and jam avionics. Either ban laptops (yeah freaking right) as carry ons, or HARDEN THE FREAKING PLANE LIKE YOU SHOULD HAVE DONE ANYWAYS. If you're worried about RF leakage out the windows, put a metal screen over them. Come on folks. We KNOW how to shield things properly, and we know how to test if we did it properly. The test equipment doesn't cost that much (100K, which is nothing for an airline). On another rant, why don't cell base stations detect the case where the idiot is obviously up the the air? That's a problem that should be easily solvable via electronics, and not by regulation.
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That was an excellent article. Easily one of the best I've ever read on the issue. One passage in particular caught my eye.
"But faced with the slimming down of work forces, expanding job responsibilities, and the retirement of older personnel who had specialized knowledge and experience in electromagnetic compatibility, the potential for problems increases..."
Boeing has already laid off a huge number of engineers, more than I think they ever should have, all in the name of "Shareholder Value."
I wonder where the "Shareholder Value" will be if the lack of one or more of those laid-off older guys, many of whom probably had all the knowledge ever needed regarding electromagnetic noise, will cause serious problems when future airliners are not properly designed, in terms of their avionics and wiring, to stave off interference problems?
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
The problem is (mainly) not due to wiring.
The problem is in fact that the radio navagation aids 'navaids' operate at low frequencies and use geo-displacement / frequency modulation as part of the navigation method. The most common example, the VOR, or 'very high omnidirectional radial beacon' sends out a radially sweeping signal at 3600hz. This is such a low frequency that it can be affected by non-primary frequencies in small electronic devices. For example: CDMA/TDMA cellular phones, while operating at (at least one of them) 1900Mhz (AFAIK), they have polling frequencies that could be very close to 3600hz.
I would really like it if GPS was the primary navaid, but it is not. GPS was just recently approved (in the last two weeks) for IFR approaches, and until now, it wasn't even legal to conduct a full flight to commercial minimums (I think it's Category III ILS) - making it useless to commercial air carriers. Further, it's going to take the FAA at it's current rate, over a decade to convert the terrestrial navaid approaches and nav plates to include GPS routing and approaches.
Thus - here's just one example, where it's not the routing, and hopefully this will clear up the radio frequency problem... When I take off with my CFI into IFR (clouds, zero vis), I guarantee you that we both turn off our cell phones! (and that's in a 4 seater cessna 172)