Cringely: Wi-Fi in the Sky

Boiled Frog writes "In Cringely's latest article, he describes his plan to test a wi-fi connection between his house and his plane using two LinkSys 802.11g routers. He plans to experiment with various antennas to see which works the best."

Comments

Cringe-ly

[LostCluster]

Sometimes, this Cringely guy just makes me cringe...

He takes a rather quick review of the geek-unfriendly regulations in the sky, and then simply says that because he doesn't believe in them he's going to openly ignore them.

At least he'll be using his own plane, so the only life he's risking in this situation is his own and maybe one or two willing others. Part of the reason why the FAA is over-sensative over what's going on within commerical airplanes is because if the unthinkable random frequency collision were to happen, it might cause an instrument to give a wrong reading to the pilot and the result would be hundreds of people being killed. That's rather high stakes to be guessing...

Re:Cringe-ly

[SatanicPuppy]

The first thing that leapt to my mind was, "If he doesn't get a signal, is he going to turn around and try it again...only lower?"

And lower...

And lower...

And his next article is going to deal with how he pulled a wifi equipped plane out of his roof, using a common lawn tractor.

Re:Cringe-ly

[PD]

Wrong instruments shouldn't cause crashes any more than a broken speedometer in your car will cause a crash. Competent pilots can fly with their backups, or their eyes.

Re:Cringe-ly

[RPI Geek]

At least he'll be using his own plane, so the only life he's risking in this situation is his own and maybe one or two willing others. Part of the reason why the FAA is over-sensative over what's going on within commerical airplanes is because if the unthinkable random frequency collision were to happen, it might cause an instrument to give a wrong reading to the pilot and the result would be hundreds of people being killed. That's rather high stakes to be guessing...

Being a student pilot myself (35 hrs cumulative flight time), I really doubt that he's taking any significant risk at all. As it says in the article, it is up to the PIC (pilot-in-command) to decide whether or not to allow the use of personal electronic devices, and just looking over at his laptop while flying poses just about no risk. On a cross-country flights (100+mi), there's maps to be examined, air traffic controllers to contact, radio stations to tune into to verify your location, a flight computer to use (think complicated slide rule), passengers to talk to, and increasingly, GPS units to play with. He's been a pilot for 35 or so years, so I'm sure he'll set up everything on the ground and get it working before he ever starts the plane's engine, so just looking over to the laptop to check signal strength and connect to the internet shouldn't take any more concentration than looking at a sectional chart to make sure he's outside the local airspace.

As to the equipment interfering with the instruments, small aircraft have instruments based mostly on mechanical parts. Heck, some of them don't even use electricity to spin the gyroscopes. Additionally, I'm sure he's flown in this area before and therefore is familiar witht he terrain - every pilot I know has flown over his/her home numerous times :-) Commercial aircraft use more sensitive electronic gauges, but my opinion is that they're robust enough to handle the interference from PED's; even if there's a problem, though, teh pilots are trained to fly using much less equipment than the plane actually has. Most people don't realize how much redundancy is build right into the regulations.

Bottom line, I agree that the FAA is being oversensitive, and I'm very curious about how this all turns out.

Anywho, back to work.

Re:Cringe-ly

[delcielo]

For the most part, I agree with you.

He's poo-pooing research into the matter by saying that it doesn't prove anything; and yet he's not giving any evidence that it's not true.

He does have the priviledge under Part 91 to do this in his own plane, though. The thing is, his homebuilt small plane probably has better insulation on the wiring than a mid-80's airliner. Also, he probably doesn't fly his little homebuilt on autopilot much (if it's even equipped with one) whereas an airliner spends most of its time being flown by the flight director (fancy autopilot), which is the component that we're really worried about, as it will follow a failed instrument without question, as opposed to analyzing whether or not the indications make sense. So, in the end, he won't really have proven anything regarding the RF interference issue on aircraft.

Finally, I'm not going to spend $1000 having an A&P mechanic install my $100 wifi router in my airplane. If I could just slap it in myself, that would be one thing; but with an airplane you're going to need a Form 337 approval at least, if not an STC (Supplemental Type Certificate). No big deal on the 337. It just takes time and thus money. That's money I'll be spending just help the wifi cloud when I happen to be flying? Uhh, I'll pass.

Re:Cringe-ly

[CatLord42]

... Part of the reason why the FAA is over-sensative over what's going on within commerical airplanes is because if the unthinkable random frequency collision were to happen, it might cause an instrument to give a wrong reading to the pilot and the result would be hundreds of people being killed.

I'm sorry, I don't buy this. If planes are so reliant on all these telemetry signals that a bunch of electronic devices in the cabin could cause them to crash because the pilots cannot possibly look at the instruments, look out the window, and figure out something's wrong, I don't know how any airline managed to stay in business or keep any sort of plane in the air before, say, 1995. Without GPS and the (incredibly consistent) global air-traffic radar systems, why, you couldn't so much as fly a plane over a country with whom your at war to drop a bomb.

Oh, wait, they did, and radar hadn't even become useful or reliable, in the early 1940s.

One of my favorite "West Wing" quotes is from the opening scene of the pilot (I think...), where Toby gets a page and calls into the whitehouse, and the flight attendant tells him he has to turn off his cell phone because the plane is approaching the airport. Paraphrasing, his response went something like, "This aircraft is equipped with a $60,000 telemetry system hooked into a multi-million dollar national air traffic control system, and you're telling me that I can cause the plane to crash with something I bought from Radio Shack for less than $30.00? Do you know how stupid you sound?"

I don't know, but something just doesn't seem right.

Re:Cringe-ly

[div_2n]

It isn't too hard to figure out:

1) There are in-plane phones that charge your out the ass to use them. Cell phones kind of bypass that. It isn't surprising that they don't allow cell phones in-flight.

2) I have read that cell companies say that the phones would confuse the cell network due to being able to "see" so many towers. I don't buy that as I have used my cell on top of a 250ft tower on top of a tall mountain well within the range of at least 10 cell towers. No problem as far as I could see.

3) When the terrorists took over the planes in 2001, passengers were using cell phones to make calls while the planes were going. The pilots were NOT professionals. They had enough training to steer them into buildings and that is about it. They didn't crash because of cell phones being used. Hmmmm.

You can bet that cell phones are not a danger to make planes crash. That isn't the reason they are banned. You can bet on that.

Re:Cringe-ly

[Jott42]

There is a difference between banning something because it is sure to make the plane crash, and banning something because it might make a plane crash. You assume that mobile phones are banned because of the first, but it might be the latter.

Ask yourself: If it were the case that mobile phone use would crash a plane every 10.000 landing, would you allow it to be used? Or every 100.000 landing? Especially in the US with the system of suing people for negligence?

(AFAIK, one reason for not being allowed to use anything during takeoff and landing is because mobile phones, electronic games and laptops are too good at playing projectiles if the plane has to make an emergency stop...)

Re:Cringe-ly

[Cecil]

Also being a private pilot, I suggest you stick to what you know.

There are hundreds of thousands of reasons an instrument could give a wrong reading. That's why there are multi-purpose instruments and backup panels. You check one instrument against another, against how the plane feels, and if possible against what you see out the window. If they don't make sense, there are procedures you follow to figure out which to trust. All the instruments use different methods of operation to basically guarantee that you have at least some working instrumentation no matter what fails. Some run on the engine vacuum pump, some run on an electric vacuum pump, some use gyros, some are mechanical, some use atmospheric pressure, some are electric, some are radio. This is all covered in basic ground school training and every half-trained pilot could tell you that.

Electric and radio instrumentation is still, and likely always will be, the least trusted instrumentation on an aircraft not because pilots are luddites (we are, in some ways) but because it's the newest and most complex, and so much can go wrong with it. With something running on pitot static pressure, short of the linkages to the control seizing up, it's absolutely bulletproof. If you have come to trust GPS on cross-country flights to the point that you don't think it can be wrong and don't bother to set in a VOR or use your compass and map, then you're a bad pilot and shouldn't be flying. Those things need to be kept up to date and current so that if your GPS system fails, you can shrug it off and look down at your map and everything is just fine.

Oh, and finally: He's not breaking any regulations. Like most other things, the FAA says that the decision of whether to allow portable electronic devices to be turned on is left up to the operator of the aircraft. It even says this in his article. Cringley is clearly the operator of his own aircraft. He can choose to do whatever he wants. The FAA has some extremely important rules that all pilots MUST follow. But they have nothing to do with electronic devices.

Re:Cringe-ly

[jcleland]

FYI: Pilots, especially those of light aircraft, don't use their fuel guages the way you use the one in your car. My fuel guage could read just about anything and I wouldnt' be freaking out because I knew, before I took off, how much fuel I had on board and how much I burn per hour. This is just basic PPL stuff. Most GA fuel guages don't read accurately anyway. Mine read 1/4 when the tanks are about 1/2. Most instruments critical to flight aren't subject to this kind of interference anyway:

Altimiter: barometric pressure
Attitude Indicator: Vac/gyro
Directional Gyro: Vac/gyro
Turn coordinator: Electric gyro
Airspeed: Pitot/static pressure
VSI: static pressure

These are all mechanical in nature. GPS and nav radios are another story, but it's not likely that a malfunction of either is going to cause an accident in VFR conditions. Besides, IFR certified GPS are required to have RAIM which would most likely be out if your phone were interfering with your GPS. My Apollo CNX80 used to report RAIM outages over Quantico, VA until a recent software update. They are VERY picky about signal integrity and the slightest disagreement between sats will cause them to flag.

Just as a disclaimer, YMMV in an A330. I'm sure that large commercial aircraft with integrated flight directors/fms/etc are subject to more problems from interference. Plus, it's not as easy for a pilot to understand the systems of a more complex aircraft/avionics suite and determine what's safe and what's not. I wouldn't hop in even a Malibu Meridian and casually allow my passengers to use a cell phone when I was expecting enroute IMC either.

I doubt that we are talking about a terribly complex set of radios. Don't worry about Cringely, I'm sure he'll be fine.

Robert X. Cringely, Dead at 45.

[Cavio]

In sad but related news, Robert Cringely passed away today in a private plane crash. Investigators blame bad weather and the fact that Mr. Cringely was Surfing The Damn Internet while aloft.

Wi-Fi

[Rethcir]

Someday somebody's going to have to explain the whole war-driving/war-flying type thing to me... I really don't see the appeal in doing all this seemingly pointless stuff with wireless just to watch a few numbers fluctuate on a laptop. (I'm sure a lot of you think I should be banned from slashdot for saying that though). (Also, who names their kid "channing?" or "cole" for that matter? The quality of child naming has really gone down of late...)

Re:Wi-Fi

[goldspider]

"I really don't see the appeal in doing all this seemingly pointless stuff..."

You're new here, aren't you?

from the blackhawk-down dept.!?!

[Bob Cat - NYMPHS]

What an insensitive thing to say.

Learn some manners, michael.

Tragedy of the commons...

[LostCluster]

Right now, many aviation headsets come equipped to work with your regular mobile phone, suggesting that at this moment there are probably hundreds or thousands of people flying around in little planes and yacking their heads off. Yet for some reason the mobile phone companies don't seem to be complaining. Have you heard any complaints?

A few rare rulebreakers won't have as much affect on the network as if the rule was repealed and everybody on the plane was doing it. If 200 people on a plane flying overhead are on their cell phones, that'll be a much different situation than what's never really been tested.

Mesh in the Air

[bromoseltzer]

The interesting point here is that there are a lot of aircraft in the sky at any time. With a small WiFi-like box in each one, you've got a dandy mesh network. It is independent of land lines and satellites, so it is a new kind of connectivity. Whether there's any application other than aviation support isn't clear to me. The bandwidth wouldn't give you much video for the passengers, etc.

-mse

Re:Mesh in the Air

[TheSync]

At 5,000 feet, air-to-gound line of sight is 100 miles, aircraft-to-aircraft line of sight is 200 miles. Most urban areas will probably have at least one aircraft within 100 miles at any point!

As proof-of-concept, listen to VHF air frequencies, you will hear 20-30 planes over a few minutes.

I have worked space station MIR with a 5 watt handheld VHF transmitter, which is about 100 miles away.

My impression is that if all commercial airline planes carried mesh network devices that could emit a few watts, urban areas could probably have near 100% mobile digital coverage, the question being just how much bandwidth would be available, which would be a cost/benefit ratio based on how complex the devices in the planes need to be.

It also would stress the mesh routing algorithms!

Warflying...

[taubman]

Sorry Bob, someone beat you to it.

But i'd still be interested to see the results of a bi-directional test..

Cheap Wi-Fi Internet: Signal Reflectors

[william_lorenz]

Towards the end of his article, Cringley seems to suggest that it might be possible to use ground stations aimed upwards, like AirCell, to provide airplanes with wireless network connectivity. Those airplanes, in exchange for the use of the network connectivity, could then bounce signals back down to earth from a much higher altitude to cover a much wider area. Something like an FM repeater.

I must say, this sounds like an excellent idea, but what about those rural areas where planes don't always fly, and what about if an airport grounds flights for any length of time, such as happened on 9/11? It seems to me that a better solution must be found if we're to obtain reliable network connectivity from such a system, as opposed to just cheap spotty access. But if nothing else, I give credit to Cringley for some very interesting ideas about the possibilities!

B34t|L35

[Prince Vegeta SSJ4]

Picture yourself as a packet on a signal,

With tangerine trees and marmalade skies

Somebody SYNS you, you ACK quite slowly,

A Port with kaleidoscope eyes.

LCD flowers of yellow and green,

Towering over your head.

Look for the Port with the sun in her eyes,

And she's gone.

WIFI in the sky with diamonds.

WIFI in the sky with diamonds.