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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.
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
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...
... 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!"
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.
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.
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I doubt it. After being readied by your pleasant trip through security where you begged for your insulin back, the comfort of flying with your knees crushed into the back of the seat in front of you while a kid kicks the back of your seat will sooth your troubled soul. And if that isn't enough you can eat your bag of pretzles (only on select flights) on your tiny tray. Then you can join the 10 person long line to the toilet only to get to the front in time to be ordered by the flight attendant to get back to the your seat because they'll be landing in 1 hour.
No, I see no passengers being bothered by this.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
...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.
Ah, but you never know which straw is the one that finally blows out the camel's back, do you?
Let's hope at some point airlines and our security apparatus will try to improve the airline travel experience.
Enabling cellphone use on airliners ain't it.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
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.
You probably have a CDMA phone. GSM phones, such as those used by Cingular, cause interference with various noise-emitting devices. My desk phone at work always buzzes about a second before I get a phone call on my Cingular phone.
When the President is flying coach on Delta, we'll take your point seriously.
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
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
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
You trust the Mythbusters? They do stunts for movies, not actual science.
Here's an article from the IEEE Spectrum: http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/mar06/3069.
My other car is first.
I was in front of this guy a few years back. He's on his cellphone, talking to his credit card company. He's trying to be quiet about it, but ends up giving them his full name, card info, mother's maiden name, and some password (I was surprised by this last one until I tried to talk to my own CC company recently...they were looking at the wrong account which apparently needed a password to access. When I gave them my account number again, my account wasn't password protected.).
So I've already had my pad of paper out for a few minutes, I jot down all his information. When my stop comes, before his, I stand up, make a show of tearing the page out of my notebook, fold it up, and hand it to him. "Be more careful," I tell him, and walk off.
And I'm not sure why some people talk so loudly on the cell phone. I don't fly often, but I agree with others...let people text or something, but no calls please.
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.
Most airlines provide this on long-hauls. It's called First Class.
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,...
Beating off in the head doesn't get you into the Mile High Club.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
It's always been technologically possible to make cell phone calls from the plane, it's just not actually ALLOWED.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Did I say I am making those calls? Did I say I want to annoy you?
No.
All I am expressing is that there are people that need to be able to be reached anytime, anywhere, and that the statement "Nobody is so important they can't be unreachable for a few hours." is completely false in the modern world.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
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.
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.
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