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Qantas Blames Wireless For Aircraft Incidents
musther writes "An Australian airline Qantas Airbus A330-300, suffered 'a sudden change of altitude' on Tuesday. "The mid-air incident resulted in injuries to 74 people, with 51 of them treated by three hospitals in Perth for fractures, lacerations and suspected spinal injuries when the flight bound from Singapore to Perth had a dramatic drop in altitude that hurled passengers around the cabin." Now it seems Qantas is seeking to blame interference from passenger electronics, and it's not the first time; 'In July, a passenger clicking on a wireless mouse mid-flight was blamed for causing a Qantas jet to be thrown off course.' Is there any precedent for wireless electronics interfering with aircraft systems? Interfering with navigation instruments is one thing, but causing changes in the 'elevator control system' — I would be quite worried if I thought the aircraft could be flown with a bluetooth mouse."
I would say this claim by Qantas is highly suspect. The mythbusters did a special to debunk the myth of wireless device interference. Ostensibly, Airbus uses some form of protection for their avionics. If not, as others are sure to say, fly Boeing! A wireless mouse uses a very, very low transmission power. This is not to say that I am in favor of cell phones on planes. If you are going to be crammed into a hollow tube, the last thing you want to hear is someone yaking on their cell phone while sitting in a seat with a cushion so thin that you are really sitting on the seat frame.
Until they backup their accusations, its just an attempt to divert responsibility instead of saying "Oops, we messed up".
If it is a fact that a common wireless communication device can cause this sort of issue - why do they not have policies and procedures in place to prevent it? I'd say all blame still lands squarely on their shoulder - if some tool with a bluetooth headset can bring the plane I'm riding on down, you better believe I'm placing my faith in the airline that they take necessary measures to ensure that isn't possible.
Seems a lot more likely they slipped on their maintenance schedule however and a component in the plane failed, simplest answer is often the correct one.
Overclockers
The FAA has an advisory on PEDs (personal electronics devices) called AC 91.21.1b where they suggest that carriers set their own standards as to what PEDs are allowed and which are not. This applies to US planes only, but I mention it as a point of comparison.
Whenever you read incidents of PEDs interfering with aircraft, it's important to note that they're pretty much all anecdotal. There's a story from 15 years ago where a pilot claimed that a laptop being turned on and off would toggle the autopilot disconnect, for instance, but when the airline purchased that exact laptop from the passenger and tried reproducing it on the same route at the same location and altitude, they were unable.
Modern avionics are not very susceptible to interference like this. Qantas may have chosen this explanation at this point for the same reason that a software developer might claim 'alpha bit decay' (or cosmic rays) was responsible for an unreproducible software crash. No confirmation is guaranteed, and a negative result during a test doesn't prove that the theory is wrong.
For my background, I've developed software, built programmable electronics, and installed avionics in aircraft. I don't claim to be an expert, but I've got a 'Bravo Sierra' alarm that's going off when I read this story.
Personally, I used to support PC-based ECG capture devices. I used to really like taking people who claimed their phone had no effect on medical devices, and taking them to stand in front of an ECG monitoring screen and *showing* them the effect on the traces that it had.
Mybusters proved that cellular signals, even those jacked up 20x didn't interfere with ANY instruments in a Cessna, IN FLIGHT. I'm pretty sure that a wireless mouse signal is much more benign than that of a 20x cellular transmitter. There is no way a "Wireless mouse" did this. bah!
What about cars with the drive by wire for the gas pedal. We have yet to hear about a car that accelerated on it's own because of cell phone interference.
These are jet aircraft. They are enormously powerful aircraft with sufficient redundant power to deal with multiple engine failures. So, with all the engines on, you've got some zoom zoom if you want it. Remember that these things are derived from military bombers in design and as such even these big planes can do things that old Mustang prop aircraft would only dream of.
In fact, let's look at an A300 vs a P-51 Mustang... Mustang we think of as an agile fighter, the A300 as a lumberer. But... numbers tell the story. The Airbus, and really any modern commercial jet, will have a higher cruising speed, a higher climb rate, and better power to weight ratio than any world war II fighter aircraft.
So you yeah, in theory, you could quite literally g-loc your passengers, etc... that's why having the reinforced doors is the preferred anti-terrorism weapon. If you are a pilot with a terrorist banging on your door with a steakknife, all ya gotta do is push the stick foward and back and flatten the guy on the ceiling and then floor of the plane. You could quite literally kill the guy.
This is my sig.
Yes like a couple of years back when Ford blamed Firestone for explorers that where rolling over when a tire burst. Despite the fact that there were pathfinders and other SUVs with the same tires that didn't roll over even when the tires burst.
They can't be blamed at all, for one simple reason: Cosmic radiation. The radiation produced from high energy collisions in the upper atmosphere douses a plane in far more EMI than any cell phone could ever generate. A few hours in a airplane gives you a year's worth of ground level radiation exposure.
I don't doubt it for a second. There is a reason that federal law says you must turn off electronic devices, and has for decades.
I'm a pilot, and I've seen it happen. Not the level that is reported in this story, but simple electronics interfering with navigation and flight controls. (What do you think is used as input to the autopilot? Yes, the navigation instruments.) I've been on more than one IFR flight where I had to make sure that certain radio gear was turned off before contacting certain approach controls, because that radio caused the aviation radio to be useless. And that radio was a professionally installed, certified radio, not a piece of whatever being carried by just anyone.
They're that paranoid, and I'm supposed to believe they let people on board with gear that can interfere with the steering of the plane?
Yes, you should believe they let people on board with gear that can interfere with the steering of the plane, because they let ME on a plane with gear that can interfere with the steering. They let a lot of people I know on planes with such gear. They let a lot of people like me that I don't know on planes with such gear. Only one time in twenty years of flying have I been prohibited from carrying a radio on board an airplane, and that was a long time before 9/11. A stupid KLM screener confiscated a SHORTWAVE receiver, putting it in a sealed envelope for the purser to give back to me when we arrived. During the flight I pulled out the duty free catalog, and sure enough, they would SELL me an almost identical model to the radio they took. I called the purser, and he said yeah, it was stupid, here's your radio. Just don't turn it on. Never have I had any of the transmitters I've carried refused.
The summary talks about flying the plane with a wireless mouse. That's ludicrous, and it's dishonest to pretend that that's a fair statement of the problem. The problem is not taking control of the plane by sending the correct signals to do specific things, the problem is interference in either the navigation radio or onboard electrical controls that cause UNspecific things to happen. Anyone who has heard the BRRRPP of their cell phone in the audio of their stereo or computer speakers has had the problem demonstrated to them. You don't think that CPU speakers are supposed to pick up cell phone calls, do you? Well, I've heard that BRRRRRRRP noise coming from the audio system on a airliner.
A brand-spanking new airplane straight from the factory is unlikely to suffer from onboard interference. The wiring is new, the grounds tight and corrosion free. After twenty years in the air, the wiring isn't so new anymore, the insulation may have cracks, the grounds are frayed and corroded.
Why do they take liguids away from people? Because they can. Why? Well, most liquids are cheap commodity items. So what if you can't carry on a bottle of water, the airline will give you water for free on the plane. So what if you can't carry on a bottle of coke, you can buy one for two dollars when you get off, after drinking the airline's coke enroute. So what if you can't take a gallon of shampoo onboard with you? You aren't going to wash your hair that much before you can get to a dime store to buy another for a buck. Yeah, it's annoying and stupid and a meaningless gesture, but it makes stupid people feel better about flying, and most of the people who fly are stupid. The more people who fly, the more routes there are, and the more convenient it is for me to get where I am going instead of just somewhere close.
You can't just buy a new cell phone every time you fly. Or a new laptop. Or a new PDA. While they are approaching the level of commodity items, they aren't that easy to replace, and the reason is the data on them. There is no data in a bottle of coke that makes it any different than any other. My PDA is unique in the world.
So, yeah, a terrorist could cause a lot of trouble with elec
I hear you. I took my pilot's license in the early 80's, in the days before cell phones, but even back then my instructor used to warn me about using any kind of portable electronic device (Walkmans mostly in those days of yore), and looking back now I think it must have been because of uncertainty about how poorly-shielded nav and comm equipment in the training birds (Cessna 152's) would react to any kind of interference, even negligible. I've written a long, rambling post about my experiences working at Miami International in those days, and I could write an equally long one one about my experiences as a wet-behind-the-ears student pilot (every pilot has a wealth of flying stories), but I'll spare you, and tell you one related to this incident.
The Qantas incident brings to mind something that happened to my instructor Al, after he got a job with a cargo airline flying between Florida, the Caribbean, and South America. He was a co-pilot on a DC-6 (an old 4-engined propeller aircraft, for those who don't know), and one night happened to be in Puerto Rico doing a drop-off and pick-up. He was standing on the ramp with the captain, watching the handlers loading crates aboard the aircraft while the captain checked them off on the manifest, when he noticed the captain turn as pale as a sheet and started to goggle at one of the pages. Turns out that the handlers had just loaded into the belly hold, right beneath the electronics bay, a number of crates containing......6,000 lbs of magnets. After both of them gazed at each other in astonishment, the captain ordered the crates removed from the aircraft, and had to be physically restrained from attacking the shipper's rep when the latter refused. The guy was exasperated that no air cargo op would take his perfectly legitimate load of magnets and wondered why the pilots were being so "silly" as to refuse good money. The eventually ditched the magnets, but everybody was pissed at the end of the wrangling over it.
Al was still shaking his head in wonderment when he told me the story a couple weeks later in Miami: "Three tons of magnets under the nav equipment. Over water. At night. I should have let him kill the fucker."