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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?"
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...
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.