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First Cellphone Use On Airplane Given OK
s31523 writes "With over 1 billion cell phone users worldwide, and with so many business travelers, using the cell phone on the airplane has been a recent hot topic. Emirate airlines is announcing they will give the OK for cell phone use on their planes, making them the first airline to do so. The FCC and FAA still ban the use, but are working to determine safety implications, if any."
Tough to keep a signal at 500 kts and 36000 ft.
To those confused, the real problem with cell phone use on airplanes is that you are traveling so fast that you are switching towers once every minute or so. One person is fine, millions doing it (which is what would happen if legal) would be a HUGE strain on cell phone networks. Airlines are installing cellphone tower equipment into their plane to eliminate this problem.
That is all class.
Let alone on a plane!
Sounds like good news for Bose; there are going to be a lot of people buying those noise-cancelling earphones.
I don't care if they determine that there is no need to ban cellphones because of interference with plane electronics -- I'd still rather the ban is kept anyway in order to keep flights from turning into cacophonous gab-fests. Flights are already uncomfortable and headache-inducing anyway...lets not make them noisy as well.
Because if being crammed into coach wasn't bad enough, now you can be crammed into coach next to some asshat having a loud conversation on his phone for the entire flight. Sounds like a damn good time!
"In case of emergency, break glass. Scream. Bleed to death."
the vast majority of people drive while on the phone, I don't think I'd want to be on a plane with a pilot who's on his cel phone the whole time.
Oh, you meant the passengers. I'll pass. I really don't need to have an entire flight filled with, "Guess where I'm at! Yeah, it's great! I can finally use my phone to call you from somewhere over [insert country/state/territory/ocean/whatever]. So how are things going? You get that urine problem taken care of."
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
If this becomes common on US airlines, look for "plane rage" incidents to spike upwards.
Can you imagine trying to endure a long flight seated next to one of those insecure, nonstop-talking, loudmouth cell-junkies?
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
I hope one of the health and safety issues they look in to is the effect a cell phone has on a trachea when forcefully inserted by an enraged passenger tired of hearing the unfortunate cell user blather for five continuous hours...
Just what we need.
Some loudmouth cell phone usage by some self-absorbed jackass while packed like sardines into a tin can for 6 hours.
... that I can play Snake on a plane now?
Let's ignore the issues of cellphones interfering with the flight controls. We'll ignore that search for a random cellphone on some oriental airline long ago, purported to be messing up the landing.
From what I understand, cellphones work by associating themselves with "cells" of coverage. The closer they are, the less power they use, and so on. When the user moves cells, the network switches them over to the new cell.
From the air, a cellphone will see many, many different cells as being equally good. It will also have to switch across cells much faster than normal. Without the plane itself acting as a roving cell tower for the occupants, it seems to me that this would cause a lot of problems. Not only will all the cellphones be transmitting at full power, but the network will potentially have to handle many many more switches cell to cell, and faster than normal. There's evidence of this from TFA when it said some upscale, long-haul airlines are installing equipment onboard that will allow for cell phone use.
I'd love to hear from anyone in the business that could shed more light on these technical issues, and whether they are as big of a problem as I suspect if airlines were to just say "Sure! Use your phone!"
From the Blurb:
From a recently declassified CIA Transcript:
Not that it wouldn't be nice for some but I really don't want to listed to 20 people's conversations all at once in a plane for 5 hours.
The only benefit I can see is hooking up to the high speed data network and web surfing for my entire flight.
Nobody is so important they can't be unreachable for a few hours.
We have all be subjected to the loud mouth jackass before. You know, the one that answers his/her phone in a restaurant and basically yells so that everyone can see/hear how important they are. Now the one save place we have from these people is going away.
Perhaps we can convince the airlines to make the engine noise louder to drown them out.
is EM interference. Cellphones (especially the GSM ones) tend to be quite noisy. Don't believe me? Make a call near a radio.
The Raven
This "Cellphones in Airplanes" type of article appears periodically in /. and every time I have to rise from my grave to correct the false speculation about cellphones interfering with avionics.
Cellphones do not cause aircraft to crash and burn! There. Thank you.
Here's my longer explanation for those interested: Avionics ABC
Airlines offering the use of GSM cellphone services equip the cabin with a basestation similar to one used RF-secure buildings and underground facilities. It will handle all the calls within the cabin and connect to the phone network via satellite datalink. It's all compatible, safe and tested method that has been used for years now on business jets.
www.tribalnetworks.org - helping tribal people around the world to own their own means of high-tech communications
Does the nationality of the fatass really matter much?
--
RumorsDaily
And will enjoy grabbing their annoying cell phones out of their hands and throwing them to the back of the plane.
Especially since they all insist on talking louder than a normal conversation when they have them.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Insightful? Now not being able to read is modded insightful?
Who are these moderators and how do they keep their points? They must be doing the Slashdork goosestep.
YOU'RE A MORON!
...only this time instead of smoking/non-smoking, we need cell phone and non-cell phone sections. Or better yet, talking and no talking sections.
...is that very few people seem to understand exactly how they work well enough to be able to make decent judgments as to what constitutes a risk. First off we have the people who are afraid of ANY kind of electromagnetic radiation passing through the body. They worry that being hit with cell phone signals, WiFi and microwave range cordless phones will cause a variety of ills ranging from cancer to genetic mutations. The people who argue that these things can't happen don't have much to back them up either. So in reality the jury is still out as to whether or not having all that artificial man-made radiation passing through you is really dangerous or not. There also hasn't been a significant period of time to produce a useful study. Face it, we're the guinea pigs and the businesses behind these devices don't care if 25 years from now it's suddenly proven that these signals caused a rise in some kind of illness. It's likely that the technology will have been supplanted anyway.
Next you have places like hospitals that demand that you turn your cell phone off because the signal between it and the cell tower may disrupt hospital equipment, pace makers and the like. There are some examples from the past that illustrate this but they were most probably from the era of analogue cell phones which had stronger signals and *may* have interfered with someone's pace maker or some hospital equipment at some point in some unusual circumstances. On the other side of the argument you have the people who are in love with their mobile devices and are livid that they have to turn them off in hospitals. You hear a lot of them complain about how the doctors happily use WiFi tablets and other microwave devices and yet they forbid cell phones.
Then the airplanes... Although no one has ever come out and directly stated why electronics on board a plane are forbidden during takeoff and landing. The rumours I've heard are that the generation of signals by those devices is strong enough to disrupt the plane's guidance systems thereby creating a risk of crashing. Not having been a pilot at any point, I can neither verify nor discredit this claim (but I'm sure some Slashdot reader who is a commercial airline pilot in his spare time will verify it for me).
My main point is that there ARE people who DO know the realities of microwave devices and interference. They are more than likely the engineers who develop these devices. And they are noticeably absent from the discussion. This leads me to believe that there may be some truth to the risks that they don't wish to publicly discuss since it would probably cost them their jobs. I can say that with a background in electronics myself, that I can see how under certain freak circumstances a small device like a cell phone could interfere with some other device utilizing the same or resonant frequencies. But there'd have to be some special circumstances. In my experience it seems that microwaves, due to their very very small wavelengths, don't act like radio waves in the AM or FM radio or TV bands. This leads to a little less predictability in discovering possible interference situations unless you're an engineer who is studying this. So, it's best to be safe. If some studies were done by qualified radio engineers who weren't paid by the cell phone industry and they determined that using cell phones on planes is safe, then it's probably fine. But I think I'll be waiting on the ground for the next half a decade if all the airlines decide to allow this overnight.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
With a cell site in the plane, your phone will go into low power mode and just talk to it, not any of the towers on the ground (in theory, at least). It may see other towers, but won't try to switch to them, because they will be weaker signals than the one a few metres away.
Not to mention how easy it makes it to convert modified GTA and RPG weapons to target civilian aircraft once these are installed.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The last bastion of semi-peace and quiet is gone.
Assuming that your definition of peace and quiet includes high-volume white noise and even higher-volume crying babies.
I would have agreed but Myth Busters did quite a good test on this subject.
Running an amplified cellphone with a directional antenna and could cause
no ix to the aviation radios.
It occurs to me that cramming someone into a coach window seat and subjecting them to loud random phone calls for hours on end would qualify as torture.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
"What do you get when you sit 120 people in seats designed for Erkel for 4 hours with 2 bathrooms, no smoking, available alcohol, and constant cell phone use?
Aluminum-Tube Deathmatch at 36,000 Feet!
Premiering this July on SPIKE TV!"
We want some answers and all that we get
Some kind of shit about a terrorist threat
- Ministry
If your passenger is noisy, then use your electronics skills to create an RF jammer in the form factor of a cell phone that blocks the frequencies that cell phones use. Noisy passenger? Turn on, and problem solved, nobody knows it's you.
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
I don't care about being able to use my cellphone, but can I please use other electronics on the airplane?
I'd love to listen to my iPod for the entirety of my flight, not just the half hour between reaching cruising altitude and beginning descent. Ideally I could put the earbuds in when I sit down and keep them while we taxi, fly, taxi, deboard, and collect our luggage. The flight attendents would treat me as a terrorist if I did that now.
Coming next summer: "Cellphones On A Plane!"
Emirates said months ago that they were going to add this service, which uses an on-board picocell and relays calls very expensively very satellite. Should run at least US$2.50 per minute for calls. I wrote about this in The Economist back in September (not Emirates news): RyanAir will launch in-flight calling by the second half of 2007 on hundreds of its planes. That will be the first major deployment.
Freelance tech journalist for the Economist, MIT Technology Review, Macworld, and others
I've gotta remember that one
Earplugs are good at muffling excessively loud sounds, particularly keeping them from damaging your ears. But you can still hear them.
People need to make two changes to their behavior in order to resolve this:
1: Be conscious of what effect your cell phone conversations, etc. are having on others, and be reasonable. Be courteous to them, and maybe don't talk on your phone in a crowded space.
2: If someone else is annoying you, confront them about it, but be polite. Getting them angry won't solve the problem, it'll make it worse. Sitting around being grouchy about it also won't solve the problem.
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
First, RPG's are pretty useless against jets. Why? Here's why
"Although they can be used against hovering helicopters, they should not be confused with anti-aircraft shoulder fired surface-to-air missile systems such as the Stinger or SA-7 'Grail'. Furthermore, firing at high elevations pose a danger to the user, because the backblast from the firing reflects off of ground. RPGs are used in this role only when more effective weapons are not available."
I suspect that your "Army" training would have taught you these things. But since you're another all talk no knowledge bullshitter, that explains your ignorance.
Second, those weapons capable of shooting down an airliner are already capable of locking on, with far greater accuracy than the cell equipment would provide.
Why don't you kill your idiot self before you say anything else so obviously wrong and moronic. I mean seriously what kind of loser goes on a web board and lies about shit to sound important?
Oh wait, you do.
If its not bad enough that your fellow passenger's blubber is on your arm-rest, and sometimes even on your arm, now we have people screaming "can you hear me now" ever other minutre as reception and drop-offs will obviously be a problem.
People still use airplanes?
I tought cell phones worked just fine on a plane even before 9/11/2001 ... How could then folks from fligh 93 call down to inform people of what's going on? They did call, right?
Or is it something that certain government wants us to belive?
I can only imagine where the Teenaged girl won't stop saying... Like OMG, Ponies!
Name: Mr. Anon E Mouse; SSN: 555-55-5555
If they find a way to charge for use of the local cell installed on the plane, I bet that you will find fewer people that actually sign up to do it. I am unsure of what technical issues they would face, but it seems to me that they could charge either the individual carriers when one of their customers used the airplane's tower (like roaming charges), or ... ? Making people reprogram their SIMM cards would be too much of a pain.
However, if there is a way to charge for it, you can bet that the airlines are already figuring out how.
If this is the case, doesnt it make you wonder how people managed to call during the 911 incident? Just makes you wonder doesnt it?
Maybe someone will start selling a cellphone jamming device.
I wish you would be allowed to sleep completely flat (as in a bunk like a ship would be good enough for me). Would be great for trans-atlantic flights. I fly quite frequently and changing hours, planes and means of transport make me kinda tired. The average flight is 18 hours, with delays 24 hours of eyes-wide-open travelling fun.
I also wish they would allow you to have sex on an airplane. Might not be for all Slashdotters, but as a frequent member of the High Mile Club, a flight attendant knocking isn't always the best option. And for the people that are too shy to hide in the bathrooms or think it's too cramped: Air France has some nice blankets, or you can bring your own, which you could get frisky under. Some tips: take the back seats or bathrooms and if you want some privacy: take a late night trip (leaving in the late PM's or early AM's) from Paris -> New York, you should get enough uninteruppted space and time after take-off.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
So now, on top of not being able to sit in the seat and having the guy in front of me crush me knees when he tries to lean back, I have to listen to chatty cathy two rows back talk the entire trip? Shame the free liquor is only in first class....
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
My friend's dad works for Boeing and has spent the better part of a year testing exactly that. That cell phones have an immeasurably small effect on the plane's controls or radios. There simply is zero problem there.
The cell phone companies would have a little more of a problem if they hadn't all solved it already. To my understanding, high-speed switching is no longer a problem on the new networks.
Here, let me sum it up for you.
Yep, that about sums it up.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Didn't they do that in Mission Impossible? Perhaps we can snag some specs.
Is that what they're calling it now?
If you aren't convinced of the safety issues presented by cell phone use on aircraft then please read the report on Passenger Electronic Devices that is posted on the NASA Aviation Safety Reporting System web-site. The report is available as a '.pdf' document at . The report includes incidents of navigation interference, including uncommanded auto-pilot deviations. Bad enough in VMC. I can only imagine the consequences a coupled approach to minimums in IMC experiencing an uncommanded auto-pilot deviation. After reading the report, I get nervous if someone turns on their camera...
Maybe I'm missing something, but it doesn't seem to be a really big problem having someone talking on a phone next to me. He's either talking on the phone or talking to his neighbor. It's all the same to me. Also, airplanes are so loud that you can't hear anyone more than a few feet away anyhow.
And the FAA knows it.
Yes, I know... Mythbusters showed that a hugely amplified transmitter placed practically on top of the instrumentation could have a measurable effect. There was little even remotely cell-phone-like about the experiment at that point.
Do you really think that after all the Draconian (though mostly useless) security checks they put you though at the airport, the FAA would just say, "oh well, there's this real threat posed to flight avionics by cell phones, but we'll just ask the airlines to have flight attendants smile and ask passengers to put their cell phones in 'Airplane mode' when they hand out pretzels"?
No, they wouldn't. If they really thought that planes might go down from cell phone transmissions, they'd make you take out your cell phone battery at security and place it in a lead box with a key and then they'd scan the checked luggage compartment for cell signal and empty your socks and underwear on the tarmac in search of offending devices.
Does anyone seriously think that of the thousands of flights and hundreds of thousands of passengers that fly in the US every day, not a single one of them receives an SMS, voicemail or email during flight? Likely billions of cell phone data/voice packets find their way to and from cell phones sitting in planes during takeoff, flight and landing every day.
It's not crashing flights.
Not crazy about this idea. I do most of my buisness travel in the evenings and usually just try to get some sleep if I am not reading a book. Having the jackass next to me yacking into his cellphone "check it out im on a plade dude" the entire trip is going to get real old real quick. As for people who advocate a designated cellphone area, a lot of flights are regional ones, where there is nowhere to go if you are getting up.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
I prefer to just keep passing gas until they cannot stand it anymore.
From what I understand, cellphones work by associating themselves with "cells" of coverage. The closer they are, the less power they use, and so on. When the user moves cells, the network switches them over to the new cell.
Right.
From the air, a cellphone will see many, many different cells as being equally good.
The issue is partly that. But it's mainly the inverse: Many cells see the phone as a strong signal.
On the ground it would be talking through and to some extent around obstructions (i.e. by bouncing off a partially reflecting wall), sending a signal propagating near the ground or som other resistive medium (and thus penetrating it and being partially absorbed), combing direct signals with delayed reflections, and so on - all of which quickly reduce the signal seen by towers and/or degrade it toward being background noise.
In the air it has a clear line-of-sight to many towers, so the signal is strong at them. And over the considerable distance the additional distance to the next tower makes very little inverse-square-law drop in the signal at the further tower. So with its transmitter turned up to hit the best tower it is heard by may other near-best towers - which must allocate a channel/time-slot for its interference or otherwise have their received signals degraded.
It's like the way one on-the-ground cellphone might be talking to one tower but chewing up resources on maybe two others. But from the air it's a lot more than two that are affected.
It will also have to switch across cells much faster than normal.
It may. But that's mitigated in some systems by a handoff scheme where the phone doesn't get handed off until its signal is degrading.
But in time-division schemes the motion of the phone relative to the cell means the cell has to keep adjusting which time slot the phone transmits in, which has much the same effect. And its motion from cell to cell also means all the cells its starting to affect have to adjust the rest of their herds of operating phones to work around its presence - and keep adjusting as it keeps moving rapidly and thus requires different workarounds.
This could be mitigated by adding an upward-facing antenna to a sparse subset of the cells. Then these would be the "best" cells as seen by an airborne phone. The link there would also be stronger so the phone's transmitter could be turned down to the point that it doesn't bother the ground-aimed antennas of the nearby cells. (Those farther away would have it "in their sights" - but with the signal attenuated by the great distance.)
Perhaps, if the regulators allow cellphone use in aircraft (without an in-aircraft cell), the cellphone network operators will do exactly that.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
These concerns are between the cell-phone users and their service-providers. Governments and airlines need not interfere. The etiquette (or lack thereof) of chatting for hours is similar.
Airlines and the governments have been lying through their teethes to us on this and other matters for a long time... It is good thing, someone is finally breaking ranks:
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
And if they do allow cell phone (transmitter) use without causing interference to aircraft nav/comms, will they please then allow me to use my GPS (receiver)?
The problem already exists in the form of passengers talking to other passengers. I'm sure the solution to that one ("Excuse me, I'm really tired and I'd like to get some sleep, can you keep it down please?") will work fine for the cell phone users too. If you're too timid to speak up, don't blame the guy who doesn't even know you're bothered.
Just lacking the obligatory Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidetone/
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Actually, cellphones do endanger planes. So do other electronic devices. This is well document but generally ignored.
7 2
Here's my longer explanation for those interested:
http://www.imp-detail.org/archive.php?apid=107#10
http://www.imp-detail.org/archive.php?apid=112#11
The post that bananaendian references here, while pompous and belligerent, appears to represent an opinion rather than informed fact. The final shot of that post, "I'm an avionics technician and I teach this stuff. I'm also radio amateur and electronics warfare instructor so I kind of work with RF on a daily basis," doesn't necessarily prove that the poster has a solid understanding of these particular issues. FWIW, I spent two years working for the FAA with the NAVAIDS we're discussing here. If you really are familiar with electronic warfare, you have no doubt that it's trivial to totally hose the avionics on a commercial aircraft. The posts I referenced above represent my personal experiences working for the FAA, as well as the personal experiences of commercial pilots as reported to NASA's ASRS (Aviation Safety Reporting System).
Regulatory actions by the FAA, like those in other federal agencies, are often held hostage to uninformed public opinion. So far they've held fast on this particular rule, and I hope that (if nothing else) it stays in place.
Aircraft are the last refuge against idiots blathering constantly on cell phones. Hopefully they won't allow BT headsets too.
All my phones have had sidetones (at least if I've gotten the term right). Have you ever tried blowing into the mic on your cell? Then you can easily hear the sidetone.
Sigs are bad for your health
Sorry, bu the Solicitor General's wife called from her cell on the plane that went into the Pentagon. Strange how they never found anything of the plane? There is no recording of her call.
My wife, trained at the graduate level in statistics, took an Airbus 319 on a flight out of OAK in 2005. Once the plane was airborne, it started "wobbling badly" (my wife's term). The captain came on the P.A. and commanded that whoever had their cell phone on should turn it off immediately. Very soon thereafter, the wobbling stopped.
A319s, I believe, were not designed with shielding against RF interference of the cell-phone-in-the-passenger-compartment kind. Off is always safest, at least on takeoff and landing.
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
"Smoking or non-smoking?" You don't get that choice anymore since the airlines woke up to the fact that it's rude and unhealthy to smoke in the presence of non-smokers.
"Cellphone or non-cellphone?" Cabins can be seperated into the 'my call is important and look at me I've got tons of friends' brigade and those who don't want to hear it. Then they'll figure out that cellphone users on planes are annoying assholes who should be consigned to the history books just like the in-flight smokers.
Just because something is technically feasible doesn't mean its desirable.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
How did the people on the hijacked 911 (2001) planes use cell phones, if they are only now putting the technology into planes to be able to use them in 2006?
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
If it's alwyas been allowed, then why do they have to install new equipment?
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com