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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,
Just the other week we had the article on Slashdot about cell phones not working in planes.
And, after all, what's the big rush?
Planes are generally quiet places, where you can lie back, enjoy some wine, watch a movie in the front of your seat, have a wonderfully cooked meal.
I can even recline horizontally if I so choose.
What need do you have for electronics on that? I don't want a pager or a beeper or a celly going off in the middle of the air! Not to disturb my solitude!
And another thing, let's get rid of all these damn kids with gameboys.
70 virgins? Why don't they just enroll in college?
You get virgins, alcohol, [b]and[/b] meth.
Weren't folks on that plane using cellphones with no apparent problem? And I've seen DVD players for rent in airports as well.
Forget about screening for bombs - it's even scarier to think that you can bring down an airliner with a Game Boy.
When you're not looking, this sig is in Latin.
http://www.amazing1.com/emp.htm
Sad I have to post this anonymously.
Ahh yes, modern air travel, don't trust it.
The only actual research I'm aware of on this is an FAA study from the '90s. This article is a good summary: Cell phone use isn't banned by the FAA, but by the FCC in 1991, citing "cell phones' potential to interfere with ground-to-ground cellular transmission." Another web site explains, "at altitude, a cell phone will light up multiple cell towers and may cause the system to lock up." BS? The FAA is going to do another study and they don't seem too worried about "locking up the system."
"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.
A co-worker was using a wireless keyboard for his PDA, and was told by the flight attendant to not use it during flight. It was infrared, not RF. He tried to explain this to her, but she didn't get it, which is understandable, most non-geeks wouldn't. Solution: tape a piece of wire to it, and to his PDA, while in flight. :-)
Why not test the device on the ground if the passenger wishes to use it in the air? Busy types will pay a premium for equipment certified to be safe and allowed for aircraft use.
Kids today are tyrants. They contradict their parent, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers. - Socrates 400 BC
consumer electronic devices can cause problems with an aircraftssensitive equipment, couldn't it also be the possiblity that the planes own electronics are causing sporadic problems? Why the hell is suddley my game boy that caused the plane to crash, just because they don't have any other explanation.
Shop smart, Shop S-Mart.
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.
Crude EM disruption devices are trival to build. It's one of the basic lessons in the Radio Shack Electronics sets they used to sell with springs and wires for each component in a fairly hardy box. Of course, the set used a relay to create a spark gap, then it just needed a little amplification. A spark gap would be unwieldy and make a lot of noise, but it's an easy leap to a solid state device.
Odd electronics should not be allowed as a carry on. They should go in a shielded luggage compartment, or be required to be in a shielded case to prevent such attempts.
Speaking of which, in 1996 when TWA800 went down I was going out of La Guardia the next morning. I figured it would be real fun, so I showed up hours early. I arrived to see three times the number of normal baggage handlers, and they all have shiney black shoes. There are "new" check in computers being manned by the shiney black shoe folks and it's taking over an hour to get "checked" in per person. They are really giving me a hassle, when all of a sudden a hand signal is given and the baggage handlers form a circle around a confused fellow holding a brief case. The biggest "baggage" handler says, "Drop the briefcase", followed by, "Sir, what is in the brief case?"
Then four of the handlers drop in a group and open the case and begin looking at it's contents. It's got four shiny cylinders, a lot of wiring attached to what appears to be a timer. The gentleman begins stammering. They baggage handlers repeat over and over, louder and louder, "SIR WHAT IS THIS THING!?".
As he continues to stammer, I lean over and say, "Sales pitch; make it a good one."
Something clicks in his addled brain and he begins to recite his canned pitch about plastic injection molds. I was relieved, as were several of the baggage handlers as he smoothly attempted to sell us plastic injection molds and controllers. He was led off quietly for further, "inspection".
That was a hair raising experience.
Actually, it may not just be money and the aviation industry, I suspect there is also an issue with the herd "I've been told, but did not question" mentality too. I walked into a hospital reception recently while finishing off a mobile phone call, fully intending to switch it off while actually visiting. I was asked to finish my call outside by a nurse with a mobile phone clipped to her belt, it was switched on and presumably there to receive calls. When I raised this it transpired that it was "hospital issue and therefore OK", yeah, right, whatever...
OK, that's two points, but can you even have two cru... WTF is the plural of "crux" anyway, which I guess answers *that* question. ;)
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
The IEEE had a very interesting article in Spectrum magazine 7 years ago on the issue of portable electronics and flight safety. As megahertz/gigahertz ratings increase for computing devices, this should only get worse (maybe until it gets to the point where computing is beyond "normal" RF?)
The conclusion was that there is little doubt about the interference and it is not just cell phones. The article relates an incident when too many people listening to the radio (there was some "important" sports match going on) did cause noticeable interference. It seems that in most cases the pilot can notice that some instruments are providing inaccurate readings (thanks to having redundant information around, different instruments would be affected differently) and it doesn't become a big problem.
So, by using your high-frequency electronic devices inside the plane you're making the pilot's job more difficult. During cruise flight it may be less risky and during takeoff and landing it is definitely not recommended. Personally I wouldn't even trust that much those skyphones. I'd rather err on the safe side. Read a book!
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.)
Join Tor today!
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.
I read some theory about the actual plane itself (i.e being a long metal tube) not helping with interference. Busses and trains are also long metal tubes, you can use your gps unit, your mobile, your bluetooth and wi-fi notebook and your cd player all at once in bus, car, or train with out them interfering with each-other. I was always suspicious about airline electronics policies, i guess 10 years ago they were just being as safe as they could which is fine, but now days people really need to use their gadgets so its more in the airlines interests to find out exactly whats going on and try and fix it.
Maybe its because most airliners are quite old and the avionics engineers came up with strange and un-regulated ways of doing things eg "lets send the engine temperature in analog down unsheilded line multiplexed with all the other temperatures at various random frequencies" i could see why that would cause problems.
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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...
As you can see here.
I'm a private pilot, and even on small planes we can have this problem. The problem does exist. It's not some pilot conspiracy to stop you from playing your Game Boy. Navigation is performed with the aid of a gyroscope and magnetic compass and VOR stations.(GPS is a few years away from becoming a standard). Any number of electronic devices can affect this system. In-cabin devices can have much more affect on these systems then outside incluences simply because you're basically travelling within an aluminum faraday cage. A microwave signal from a cellphone will bounce around inside the cockpit a lot more than if it is outside.
It is particularly crucial that these devices are off during landings. Landing is by far the most dificult portion of flying. On commercial planes, they are often making their approaches in IFR (Insturment) conditions. It takes very little to make approach devices go haywire. You don't want this happening when the visibility is 500ft and you are trying to touch down 30 tons of aircraft in fog. It hasn't happened yet, but sooner or later some aircraft is going to crash on landing because some schmoe couldn't wait till he got down safely to call and tell folks he is going to be late for his meeting. In 99 out of 100 cases there may be no effect on the plane, but it only takes one crucial event to destroy an aircraft. Try to remember that.
"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."- Steven Wright
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.
The problem isn't with the aircraft designers. They are designing a complex system to safely transport people. They do shield everything in the sircraft. The problem is with poorly designed personal electronics designed by yahoos who think emissions are just some lame FCC rule they barely think about. The "fix" will not be from Boeing and Airbus. It's going to come from the FAA and FCC combined. They'll tighten up the restrictions on stray emissions, and then they'll probably make a list of devices that can not be allowed. The aircraft people make a very good product. If anything needs to be "fixed" it's the poorly designed products from the personal electronics industry. You can add 2 tons of useless shielding to an aircraft (which still won't quiet all the noise) or you can add a few ounces to each device. I'm in favor of the latter.
"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."- Steven Wright
One of my good friends is a pilot for a major airline. He flies the transatlantic route to several points. Recently, we went to the Apple store near my home and he bought an iPod for him to be able to listen to his music on the flight.
I asked him if it would interfere at all with the electronics of the aircraft since it was a fly-by-wire. He said there would be no problem and that he routinely used his laptop in the cockpit without realizing the WiFi card was in and on...transmitting and receiving (nothing since no WAP was available). The reason he wanted the iPod was so he could leave the big bulky laptop packed away and have only the "deck of cards" sized music player to listen to his tunes.
He did note that his aircraft is fairly new and they were built with the thought of the possible interference and that if he were to be flying an old 737 from waaaaaaaaaaaaay back when, it was possible it might somehow interfere, but that cases like that were very rare. He said anything built since the late 70s should be able to handle the typical interference which might show up in the electronics.
Plant a tree in a developing country.
Maybe flight 93 didn't crash because the passengers fought the terrorists, it was the rest of the passengers using their cell phones.
But in reality, I have also been unable to find any scientific study about personal electronics and airline instruments / communications.
I would want to see the following questions answered: how I can use my "FCC home or office approved" device without causing any problems (the houses in my neighborhood are right up next to one another), but my iPod can somehow make an altimeter or compass screw up if I go a few kilometers above sea level? Are the airlines telling me that my Mac and neighbors' phones are better built than their jet cockpits?
Presuming that a laptop or cell phone can interfere with airplane cockpits, why can it not be detected from the cockpit? ("We've detected that personal electronics are on, and we won't take off until they're all off.") On the other hand, they cannot even detect a bomb in their luggage hold. If you cannot detect a signal from a gameboy, how can the device interfere with the plane?
It seems to me that it should be fairly simple (if not cheap) to find a correlation (or even cause-and-effect), then figure out a way to either enforce the ban, or shield the cabins and pass the cost onto the passengers.
Or, laptop makers could offer more expensive shielded models that will not be detected by, or interfere with, airplane instruments. Again, maybe some actual scientists could take a crack at proving this hypothesis first.
Now, let's talk about the unwillingness or airlines and governments to protect commercial planes against shoulder-launched missiles...
Consumer electronics devices are designed to be cheap. That means that they will not add shielding or EMI suppression unless someone holds a gun to their head.
A portable digital device can radiate large amounts of interference at many different frequencies. What is even worse, the RF output is not constant. Anything with a microprocessor in it will radiate at varying frequencies and power levels depending on what code the microprocessor is executing. This makes it almost impossible to test for interference to specific frequencies.
The earliest forms of computer music involved putting an AM radio near the computer and executing code snippets that would produce the desired sound (interference) on the radio.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
This is a PDF file of a study done by the CAA in the UK (equivalent to the FAA) on cellphone interference against instruments. It was done in a laboratory to model in-flight circumstances.
To quote from the report (6.1) :
The tests revealed various adverse effects on the equipment performance from simulated cellphone interference. Although the equipment demonstrated a satisfactory margin above the original certification criteria for interference susceptibility, that margin was not sufficient to protect against potential cellphone interference under worst case conditions.
So until there is concrete evidence one way or the other, erring on the side of caution may be advisable - its also one of the last places where you don't have to listen to some dickhead chatting on the phone in a loud voice.
Newscaster: "Fortunately, Dennis, flight 242 was struck in just the right place, giving a pleasing massage-like sensation to all aboard, and making the plane arrive in SFO a half-hour ahead of schedule. I'm Leslie Griffith. Back to you in the studio."
Most of the infamous "TV detector" vans in the UK look for local oscillator radiation from TV sets. Not only can they detect that you have a television, the frequency of the local oscillator tells them which channel you are watching. The Nazis and Soviets used similar techniques to locate people who were listening to illegal foreign broadcasts.
If you look at a spectrum allocation chart, guess what is immediately above the FM broadcast band (88-108 MHz)? The aeronautical band (108-136 MHz), used for voice communication and navigation. Now imagine that you are sitting on an aircraft, listening to KRAP 106.3 MHz on your FM radio. The radio set the local oscillator to 117 MHz (106.3 + 10.7) to mix the signal down to 10.7 MHz. The FM radio is now radiating a signal in the middle of the aeronautical band, hopefully not on a frequency that the pilot is currently using. The radiation from the local oscillator may be relatively weak, but you are much closer to the aircraft's radio antenna than the control tower or the navigation beacon. This was the earliest noted form of interference from passenger electronics to aircraft electronics, well before laptops, GBAs and PDAs.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
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
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.