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."

Comments

The Problem with Microwave Band Signals...

[eno2001]

...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.