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Electronics In Flight — Danger Or Distraction?
another similar writes "IEEE Spectrum has a blog post revisiting the debate on whether electronic devices pose a risk to flight avionics spurred by a NY Post article about Arianna Huffington's refusal to power down her Blackberry during takeoff. The post points out the EU's removal of their own ban on cell phone use in 2007 and the likelihood of significant non-compliance daily in the US — and curiously, planes haven't been falling from the sky at a similar rate. While the potential exists for there to be a problem, it would appear the risk is low. Ever bent the rules? Is an app for landing commercial jets somewhere in our future?"
If a cell phone posed even minimal danger to air traffic then you'd be required to put them in with the hold luggage or surrender them to the airline staff for the duration of the flight. There is no danger.
Even so ... what happened to politeness and consideration for other passengers?
No sig today...
That has been long gone out the window...
I dread the day when cell phones are allowed in use on the plane. Can you immigine a 2 hour flight with some person yacking away the entire time getting loud and annoying... I still don't like to listen to other people phone conversations at a restaurant. You know the type...
[...] one of the multiple reasons is passenger attention.
That's what a pilot told me too. If passengers are listening to music, for example, they won't hear announcements made on the speakers.
It's not that the inability to hear announcements is a direct threat to the safety of passengers. But it's one of those cases where you want to eliminate anything that can potentially make a bad situation become worse.
Most plane crashes, it seems to me, are caused by a combination of small incidents that—combined together—create a deadly situation. When reviewing those incidents, they never seem so serious if considered separately.
Okay, admit it. You're just making this stuff up now, aren't you?
It seems hard to believe that every third car in 1985 had voided their warranty when they installed a CB radio.
IIRC, aircraft, at least the reasonably high altitude ones, have to be designed to cope with the possibility of lightning strike(not really as bad as it sounds, even badass voltages are relatively harmless when you are inside an aluminum tube). Lighting, of course, is basically the biggest, meanest spark-gap in the entire terrestrial context(compared to, say, Jovian lightning, it isn't much at all, but that isn't really relevant to any aircraft except Xenu's space-DC9s...).
Spark gaps tend to put out some seriously gross, broad band, RF noise. A spark gap with the energy of a lighting bolt should be quite the RF emitter.
Unless the designers depend exclusively on the aircraft's outer skin for RF protection(which seems unlikely, given the systems that need to communicate and/or scan the outside world, which obviously can't be faraday-caged inside the outer skin...) they have presumably had to deal with RF of the sort that would make your weedy little powered-by-batteries-and-FCC-regulated widget wet itself.
Also one would sincerely hope, given what the higher level of cosmic ray exposure can(with low but nonzero frequency) do in terms of flipping bits in any circuitry that isn't rad-hard, critical systems would be redundant, watchdogged and quick to reboot, or both.
> It will void your warranty of your car if you install a CB or amateur radio in it.
No it won't, unless you do something stupid like tap into an ignition line for power.
> Also, I know of people who's car will turn off when they transmit using their amateur radio.
The only ham I know who this happened to found out his radio was wired improperly and it was dumping the RF output of the amp into the car's chassis, which is supposed to act as an RF shield.
I've personally done car electronics testing for OEMs. Trust me, they test against everything they can think of. A single warranty recall to fix something they missed wipes out the profit margin for an entire vehicle run for a year or two.
> If a device where to send a signal on the frequencies these receivers receive, it could cause issues.
Which is why there are frequency bands, and all transmission devices have to be licensed by the FCC to only transmit on those bands. Besides which, aircraft radios should have superior out of band rejection as they are subject to higher levels of EMI/RFI than most electronics.
Think about it for a second. Airplanes can take direct lightning hits without falling out of the sky. That's an enormous, super-wide band, ultra-high amplitude blast of just about every kind of electromagnetic radiation point blank, and they fly along as if nothing happened. You seriously think a 500mW cell phone transmitter is going to cause problems?
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
The rule of law depends on those laws being just and reasonable. When it's not, the law becomes a tool of exploitation rather than protection. When this happens it is right, and just, and good that the law is disobeyed.
Not saying that this is one of those cases. Just saying that absolute adherence to the rule of law is dangerous.
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