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Study Says Cell Phones Can Interfere With Planes
3x37 writes "The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette website reports a study by Cargenie Mellon University researchers found that cell phones do interfere with airplane cockpit instruments. The researchers came to this takeaway conclusion: "devices like cell phones 'will, in all likelihood, someday cause an accident by interfering with critical cockpit instruments such as GPS receivers.'""
I would really like to actually see this study. The researchers go so far as to say that in the future a crash will be caused by some portable electronics. There must be a way to engineer around this. They not only name cells as a culprit but also laptops and other electronics. How much EM radiation do these devices really produce? It can't be that much. How sensitive are these GPS systems in the planes. Is the GPS system the only affected system? By how much is the GPS system affected. Does it show an error of a dozen meters of a dozen kilometers or does it simply not work at all? To a certain point I understand banning cell phones, but other electronic devices?
quis custodiet ipsos custodes
So what? A lot of people smoke and don't get lung cancer. Your few hours of sporadically monitored GPS performance don't mean anything statistically.
They want you to use the expensive inflight phone
The inflight phones were removed from our fleet years ago.
It annoys others on the plane
True, but you don't need RF studies to prove that.
In the event of an accident you're phone, laptop, cd player, gameboy, etc is a nice loose projectile.
What does this have to do with RF? That's why your supposed to stow your carry-ons for takeoff and landing, the most likely time for an accident.
GPS is just one of many nav instruments in the airplane, and for all but a handful of airplanes and approaches, is not the primary nav signal used for the last few thousand feet (the ILS is.)
Over the years, we've had several anomalous nav indications that were cleared up after flight attendants had all passengers shut down electronic devices. Proof? No - but enough to keep us all suspicious.
Never shake hands with a man you meet in a fertility clinic.
One reason that is often overlooked is that the metal body of the cabin makes a very nice resonance cavity, and thus amplifies the signal considerably. As a result, a small source inside the plane has a much better chance of interferring with the sensitive on-board electronics than a strong external source. Also, tolerances for failure are significantly lower for a GPS unit on an aircraft than for a hand-held GPS device on the ground. What might be considered insignificant interference for a consumer GPS unit would be completely unacceptable for aircraft equiptment, with reliability requirements on the order of 10**(-9) or better.
IANAEE, but I work for a major manufacturer of aircraft electronics.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
There's nothing more irritating for a pilot than to be told that an airplane is going to fall out of the sky becuase somebody's using a cellphone. That's total BS! I fly aircraft with advanced avionics regularly and I've never seen a single example where a mobile telephone left on will interfere with anything.
A modern jetliner has redundant GPS receivers, fuel systems, hydraulic systems, etc. If a 767 can run out of fuel and the pilot land the aircraft safely using non-powered backup instruments and almost no hydraulic power, which has happened, then some bonehead leaving their cellphone on isn't going to pose much of a problem.