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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."
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.
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?
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
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.
> Is there any college in the U.S. with 70 virgins?
Yes, but out of politeness we call them "engineering students" instead of "virgins".
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
"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.
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.
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!
ay 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.
If you want scary, how about a terrorist on a hill top with a satellite dish? You could pump alot more power into a plane from a land based transmitter with a focused beam. You would be near to undetectable. You could fire it off through the back window of a van. You wouldn't even be able to triangulate on the beam if its a focused one. Its alot more discreet than firing a rocket launcher from near the tarmac. Even if you found the "weapon", you would be hard put to prove it caused the accident. Most police wouldn't even know what they were looking at if they found something like this.
This scares me alot more than somebody on a plane with a gameboy that uses 2 AAA batteries.
My 2c worth: Fix the planes - turning off the mobiles just hides the problem. The only defence against this is to harden the plane's electronics so that it can withstand this sort of thing.
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
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.
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."