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Electronics & Planes Don't Mix?
dirtydamo writes "The Sydney Morning Herald is running an interesting story on the old debate on whether electronic devices cause problems on planes. It appears pilots are pretty much accustomed to handling weird problems with equipment, which they attribute to passengers' portable devices. More research is needed to determine whether or not this is the actual problem, but the article certainly makes me a little uneasy about modern air travel."
Say I need more tinfoil on my hat, but I don't doubt for a moment that terrorists somewhere are looking at a way to have a "martyr" on a plane disrupt the controls from the cabin using electronics. No overt attack neccesary; he would flip a switch, sit back and look forward to his 70 virgins that Allah[0] will be handing over in a few minutes while the crew futiley scramble around until the inevitable crash.
[0] Just an example, Islam != terrorism.
Trolling is a art,
"You've got to ask, do you want to get there, or do you want to use your laptop?"
Both. It's a million dollar aircraft, and the ticket is expensive. Figure out how to make it safe. When they find themselves asking questions like this, how can they wonder why they're having a hard time making money?
Can't they insulate all the sensitive equipment from the passenger section? Maybe have a layer of lead between the cockpit and the rest of the plane?
If things are really that bad, they're going to have to do something to address this, and soon. They need to harden the equipment against interference, and do it NOW.
I've always wondered why electronic equipment on planes was so much more sensitive then the regular stuff we have down on earth. I mean I can use my mobile phone near my computer and it doesn't lock up and vice versa, turning on my computer doesn't exactly make my mobile phone calls drop out. Electronic devices are specifically designed to withstand a certain amount of interferance, did somebody just forget to do that for plane electronics?
Just a note, airlines make money from people using in-flight phones, it's not in their economic interest to have people using their mobile phones.
Now, I know that not everything is as ideal a the FCC Part 15 rules are supposed to ensure, but really, do laptops really put out that much interference in the form of radio waves? How about mp3 players, or calculators, or e-book readers? I guess that what I'm wondering is how these devices are considered Part 15 if they wreak havoc upon aircraft electronics. Yes, I can see how an actual emitter, like a wireless ethernet device, a bluetooth device, or that sort could potentially manifest, but those devices, or their functionality within a larger unit could be fairly easily detected, requiring the passenger to disable the feature, or failing that, not use the equipment in flight.
Beyond that, if a Part 15 device is that big of a problem, perhaps the FCC should start testing things.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Or is this just more of the same: "don't use your cell phone on the plane, use the convinient onboard phones we've installed, or the terrorists win (because it cuts into the bottom line)"?
If you do not fix the problem at the root, you leave yourself open to other, possibly larger, problems.
Let's face it, airplanes generally last 30 years or more before they are retired. Now, I don't put too much stock in a bunch of non-engineer pilots blaming random problems, but if there are problems with these on-board systems and electronic interferance, they need to be fixed, because electronic devices are not going to become less scarce.
We routinely hear stories on the biomedical front about how embedded electrical devices are solving problems that traditional medicine couldn't, or didn't solve well. Since the Jarvis heart, biomedical devices have bee cropping up at an increasing pace. I don't think you can ask the guy with a life-sustaining device embedded in his body to turn it off for the flight.
Add to this wearable computer technology, RFID tags everywhere, smart consumables, etc., and it is very possible that in 30 years it won't be possible to just tell people to turn their devices off. If there is a problem, fix it. If there isn't, stop scaring people.
"No overt attack neccesary; he would flip a switch, sit back and look forward to his 70 virgins that Allah[0] will be handing over in a few minutes while the crew futiley scramble around until the inevitable crash."
If we design our aircraft so poorly as to not have any manual controls, then some re-evaluation needs to occur. There's a reason that we have trained pilots that go through fairly extensive training on a particular aircraft (and are certified on only the particular plan/cockpit configuration that they fly regularly), is because they are supposed to be experts in what they do. If an electronics bug can cause a plane to fall from the sky, then the electronics have way too much control over the flaps, engines, rudder, and ailerons, and even if the computer is capable of making adjustments, the plane should still be manually controllable. I mean, what if lightning strikes a plane in the exact wrong place and it manages to cook the onboard computers?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I have a horrible impression that the use by passengers of high tech equipment is coincident with higher sophistication in the avionics and that software bugs are being misinterpreted by flight crew.
See my journal, I write things there
How could a device like a Spellchecker possibly emit enough RF to interfere with avionics dozens of feet away? If the avionics were really that sensitive then planes would be crashing every time solar activity increases or lighting strikes within miles of the plane.
An airport near here in Roanoke requires a landing approach that takes the plane very close to a couple mountains, the tops of which are literally covered with antenna blasting high power RF across the entire radio spectrum. Yet miraculously that doesn't interfere with the avionics.
Just because the problem went away about the same time the passenger turned off their spellchecker does not prove that was the problem.
What concerns me the most is that these hundreds of problems have been chalked up to consumer devices, when it could be legitimate problems internal to the avionics. If the are simply written off to external causes then the real problems will not be corrected.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
How come passing cell phone towers, HAM, satelites (GPS, etc.), cosmic rays, (... etc. ...) and even the cockpit systems themselves don't cause interference to the cockpit systems?
There's a million sources of radiation anywhere there exists modern inhabitation. How come these immensely powerful sources of radiation do not interfere with the aircraft but my CD player with 2AA batters can? And if a tiny electronic device running on two tiny batteries can disrupt an aircraft, how can it possibly be safe to fly? Doesn't that constitute a violation of FCC regulations? (Yes, I meant FCC.)
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When I pilot sees something weird with the instruments and blames it on a cell phone or PDA or something, that's really anecdotal. What I'd like to see is an interview with a cargo pilot. I mean, do pilots flying MD-11s for Fed Ex see these same little glitches? If so, I think it's safe to say it's not the passengers electronics causing the problems.
This one always pissed me off, if it's such a danger then WHY TRUST people to be capable of turning off their devices. Most people can't manage their devices anyway, they are NOT IN control of their electronics. Not such a biggie now but later on with fuel cell powered ultra wide band gadgets...
It appears pilots are pretty much accustomed to handling weird problems with equipment, which they attribute to passengers' portable devices.
And in World War II, pilots used to blame weird problems on gremlins. Lets get real: Pilots, the vast majority of whom have no background in, or understanding of, electronics, are blaming portable electronic devices for interfering with their instrumentation. They provide nothing but anecdotal evidence to support these claims.
If there is a problem, it should be documented by the pilots and the airlines, the FAA should get involved, and electronic engineers should be paid to conduct an investigation. I'll be concerned when studies run by engineers and scientists show that such problems exist and are being caused by personal electronics. Is there commonality between instruments that fail (e.g., GPS units manufacture by Trimble, fly-by-wire systems in Airbus planes, etc.) or in portable devices that generate interference (e.g., Nokia 6000 series cell phones, HP Pavilion ZE4400 series notebooks, etc.)? These are the kind of questions that need to be answered.
Flying is unpleasant enough without further, possibly unnecessary, restrictions to make it even more so. After standing in line until their legs ache, passengers are practically strip-searched without probable cause. Unskilled, ignorant baggage screeners insist that people have laptop computers X-rayed. The screener manhandle cameras, laptops, and cell phones. People are crammed into undersized, uncomfortable seats. Every few years they are told to replace their carry-on luggage with something smaller because the airlines have crammed even more seats into the planes.
Ten incidents per year (I wonder what percentage of Aussie flights that comprises) "all due to portable devices"... the article does NOT go on to detail that claim. It cites an anecdote in which one plane's systems are alleged to have come back online after a passenger turned off a device, then goes on to say that "on more than one occasion, laptop computers have been blamed for changing an aircraft's internal cabin pressure."
The incidents, logged in an Australian Transport Safety Bureau database, have been collated for the first time and detailed in the latest edition of Flight Safety Australia, published by the Civil Aviation Safety Authority."
Because the article authors didn't bother to include a link to the article, I'll assume that this is the one they're referring to. If so, this article does not in any way "collate" (collect) or "detail" them. It's a single-page article which is pretty much as insubstantive as its referer. It mentions a few anecdotes, then states:
So they hit the equipment with waves, but what was the result? They forgot to mention specifics, such as "the equipment behaved unexpectedly". The paragraph trails off with the statement that "the risk of interference is then at its greatest".
Next time you're on a flight and the plane suddenly begins to climb or pitch to the left, it's probably just the kid next to you conquering level 16 on his computer game.
Or it might be the wind and/or the captain trying to navigate the plane to its destination.
Laurie Cox, a spokesman for the Australian Federation of Air Pilots, said more research was needed into the effect of electronic devices.
Bingo.
"You've got to ask, do you want to get there, or do you want to use your laptop?"
No, I don't have to ask that. I've been "getting there" for years, while surrounded by people who use electronics.
I'm not saying electronics don't cause interference. What I'm saying is that as yet there is no basis for concluding that they do cause interference, and because such evidence would not be difficult to produce I think passengers are owed more by the airline industry and FAA than having to rely on these panic puff-piece articles that come along to garner readership by stirring the shit with unsubstantiated claims. If the airline industry or any regulatory body cared about passenger safety, they'd do a real study. Failing that, the next best thing would be for the airlines to err on the side of caution and say "we don't know if electronics do or don't cause interference, so we're banning them to be safe"; at least that would be a
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