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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.'""
All I need when I'm trying to sleep on my flight is some yahoo yelling on his/her cell phone. I think people can spend just a few hours away from thier cell.
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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?
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Unortunately, the same self-important gadget love that has people driving one-handed while juggling a phone with the other ensures that nobody will ever pay much attention to the cell phone ban until an actual plane crash happens, and is conclusively proven to have been caused by someone's phone.
Sad, really.
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My RAZR does that too!
For a while I thought I was a psyker and was actually utilizing precog, and it was manifesting as "speaker noise". But then a coworker said she heard it too, and she's so dumb she can't be psychic. It's debateable whether she's even sentient, if you ask me. Which you didn't. But you were going to. Hey, maybe I'm psychic!
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Obviously a typo. It should be referring to the Cargenie Melon, a tropical fruit first imported to this country for the Great Pittsburgh Exhibition of 1899. It escaped into the steam tunnels of a nearby university where it has been flourishing ever since.
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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.
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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.
Really!!?! That's so Cool!! WHAT!! Sorry I Can't hear You!! NO!! IT'S NOT INTERFERANCE!!! There's this Guy telling Me to be Quiet!! No wait Hang on A sec! I'm TALKING on my Cell OK!?! The WHAT!!?! How Dare... OH The Pilots!!! Oh Man!! First You Tell me To turn Down my iPod(TM), and Now This!! I Paid to Be on This flight too you Know!?
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As a pilot I can help answer this. When you are flying you are constant cross checking one thing against another. You almost always have two indications of every action a plane is taking. My VSI indicates I am climbing - is my altitude actually rising. My heading indicator is changing, does my turn & bank indicator and my magnetic compass indicate the same ? Any pilot who is not always cross checking things is not a safe pilot. If a cell phone interferes with my GPS and it indicates I am heading 300 degrees at 4000 MSL (Mean Sea Level) I have other instruments that I can instantly use to double check that. Even though I am fairly recently rated pilot (3 years) I know the value of good ole analog instruments and checking where I am on a map. I hear of plenty of pilots who hop in the plane nowadays and just punch in their destination and the GPS tells them where to go. Do not fly with these people. If your pilot is not always busy double checking things then you need to get a better pilot.
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If not, however, there's no point in lifting the ban, as an unassisted cellphone call has an extremely poor chance of getting through above 2000 feet (which would be during landings and takeoffs...precisely when you cell calls can be most hazardous).
You are right about phones not being able to place calls above 2k feet (I fly a cessna and was once able to receive a call at 1.5k, but not higher). However, do you know what a CDMA phone does when it has difficulty communicating with a cell tower? It increases its signal to full power (.6w if I'm not mistaken). How convenient, since like you mentionned, when at 2k, you're in the flight's most critical phases (i.e. takeoff and landing). Something it would not have to do with AirCell, because the "cell" is so much closer to the phone (i.e. it is in the plane). CDMA is perfectly at ease at -90dBm. Not much power required here.
Yep, I had to use the phone once on a flight. I found the phone conveniently located in the seatback in front of me to suffice. I used at my convenience and was careful not to disturb my fellow travelers. I took great care that I was not responsible for worsening an already uncomfortable situation.
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Any IFR certified GPS receiver *must* include a feature called RAIM - Receiver Autonomous Integrity Monitoring. The point of RAIM is that the receiver can detect when it is giving erroneous navigational information. At that point the receiver 'RAIM flags' rather than giving the crew misleading information. The crew can then ask for radar vectors (in the highly unlikely event that GPS is their sole navigation system) from ATC because they know it's wrong.
Cell phones DO interfere with aircraft radios though, and I have first hand experience. We were about to line up for an ILS approach into runway 08 at Ronaldsway. The pilot, a friend of mine, was making his first ever night IFR approach (it was raining, and cloud bases were about 800 feet, so it wasn't a really sticky IFR approach but it was still in the clouds and at night). I was monitoring his progress from the right seat. Sadly, he had forgotten to turn off his mobile phone.
His wife decided to phone him just as we were intercepting the localizer for 08. All audio on the aircraft was obliterated by this noise: 'bip b b bip b b bip b b bip b b bip b b bip brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr' (if you have a GSM phone on European frequencies, it's likely you've heard this noise - cell phones interfere with almost *any* radio and audio equipment in Europe probably due to some harmonic off the frequency used) until he managed to shut the thing off. It was extremely distracting to say the least, and obliterated any chance of hearing any ATC instructions. It did *not* however intefere with the localiser or glideslope receiver which showed normal indications throughout. I took control while he found his phone to shut it off.
I doubt a cell phone will ever cause an accident due to disruption of navigational equipment (especially GPS) but it may do due to distraction at a critical phase of flight (especially if it occurs during a high workload situation, or perhaps when some unrelated emergency is occurring).
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The study is flawed. Flight crew do not rely on a single source of data to tell them what's going on ever (well, at least professional ones don't - included in that are private pilots who fly in a professional manner). In addition, IFR GPS receivers have something called RAIM which enables them to know and inform the crew when their navigational accuracy is questionable.
Airliners today use not only GPS, but INS (inertial navigation - which requires no external inputs once it's set running) as well as old-fashioned VOR receivers. They can also ask for radar vectors off ATC if all their navaids were to fail.
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No.
Glass cockpit displays are wonderful and all that, but no pilot I know will use them exclusively. At the very least, there will be two of these displays in the cockpit and they will be powered by two completely independent electrical systems. It also normal to have a basic altimeter, airspeed indicator, and artificial horizon with some other indpendent power source (such as a vacuum line).
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