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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?"
Over the last few months I have been on a few EU carriers and they have the same restriction of no personnal electronics during take off and landing, same as when I was on the US carriers.
A few seasons back, Mythbusters did some tests and found that none of their phones were able to affect even remotely the instruments of a plane. It makes sense after all - we're not exactly seeing terrorists trying to sneak twelve cell phones on board and try to text each other into crashing the plane.
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...
It's a load of over-sensitive could-possibly-be-thought-might-happen crap. Like using a mobile phone in a petrol station - the risk is actually from dodgy, illegally imported batteries installed in such things which might "spark" if dropped, nothing to do with the phone itself somehow magically igniting vapours. Most petrol station fires are caused by static sparks from people re-entering their cars while they are fuelling (which in itself suggests inattention to the pump pushing litres of a flammable liquid at high speed into your car) or just plain carelessness (i.e. smoking on the forecourt).
At some point, there probably WAS a time it could interfere with a piece of equipment not designed to take account that mobile phones were nearby (even if that was just audible chirps being recorded on the cockpit tapes because the mics picked them up like mics tend to do with mobile phone "check-in" broadcasts). If you're seriously using planes which are not designed to cope with mobile phone transmissions now, you're in a serious breach of due diligence as regards safety and hazards. For a start, it's too easy to leave one on, whether in the hold, or the overhead compartments, or your pocket, or even the pilot's pocket, and secondly you are going to be flying OVER mobile phone masts (with a lot more power output) and getting very, very close to them and mobile phones whenever you come into land and taxi.
The mobile phone thing is most probably, as has been recorded in several of the EU discussions, more about radio licensing - because having lots of mobiles suddenly appear in the air can mess up OTHER things. Like I can join a ferry's maritime network but only when it's switched on when we're out at sea, not near the coast. In terms of safety, if a mobile phone, or even a thousand mobile phones, can interfere with the operation of an aircraft, then you have much more to worry about that mobile phones themselves. For a start, any transmitter, any static, any friction at all. Same for wireless, bluetooth, and anything else that operates on similar wavelengths. Hell, most aircraft that serve food have a microwave or similar heater on board - bet that churns out a million times more "Risk Assessment" than the pilot's mobile phone.
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...
The ban on cellphone usage during takeoff and landing is for your safety. The ban on cellphone usage during cruise is due to weaknesses in the cell network and your sanity.
The reason we tell you not to use your phone for takeoff and landing is because those are the point during the flight when the aircraft is most likely to encounter problems and also when our navaid usage and workload is at its highest. We are trained to assume that the airplane will crash on every flight and act accordingly - Complacency Kills! You should be in the same mindset. First, there's the matter of the crash. When the aircraft goes from flying speed to nothing in a few seconds, the G-forces are going to make that iphone/laptop/whatever that you are holding in your hands suddenly weigh several times its normal weight. You WILL NOT be able to keep ahold of it. It's going to become a projectile and injure or kill the people sitting near you. Next is longer-term survival. The fact is, most deaths in air crashes happen not during the impact sequence, but in the post-crash environment. People panic and stampede. They don't know which way is out. The aircraft is dark and possibly filling with smoke or water. Situational awareness and decision-making ability are KEY to both your survival and that of your fellow passengers. Having to get your headphones off or figure out where your laptop went is not going to help. If you weren't paying attention to things before the crash you won't know where you are now and what direction you need to go. You probably ignored the safety briefing too. See where this is going? Finally, if you are alert and paying attention, the amount of information you will be able to provide to the crash investigators after the crash will be of higher quality. Those of us at the pointy end of the aircraft probably died in the impact. Being able to give information to the investigators could uncover flaws in the aircraft or our procedures, and by correcting those save hundreds of lives. We take this flying stuff seriously. You should too.
I've heard that cell usage during cruise overloads the cell network by switching cells too often - I'm not an expert on the cell system so I'll defer to a cell tech on that. In my eyes, the ban on cell usage during cruise is for reasons of everyone's sanity. Do you really want to hear the guy in the next seat shouting into his phone about the BIG IMPORTANT EXECUTIVE THINGS BIG IMPORTANT EXECUTIVES LIKE HIM DO, or THIS THING ON MY NECK IS GETTING BIGGER, or whatever other inane thing he wants to rattle on about at maximum volume? It's bad enough everywhere else, why must we suffer too? (Misery loves company?)
Anyway, that's the score. I've repeated this I don't know how many times now and it never sticks. STICK, DAMMIT!
What? The plane crashed? I didn't notice. I was on my Blackberry. Neither did I notice the guy sitting next to me who was hitting me so I would get out of his way. I'm going to send him a nasty text message.
Ah sure, there are pretty strict limits on autoland (such as crosswind etc) - and it's not a "pilots read the newspaper while an iPhone lands the plane" affair, but Cat III autoland is equipped on the large commercial jets, and many of the large airports have a Cat III autoland certified runway, allowing for, well, autoland. Go google for it, it's pretty well described out there on the intertubes.
I'd like to see tests proving that. EMF/RFI shielding isn't rocket science. The electronics in cars are hardened against pretty much everything - cell phone towers, high voltage power lines, microwave repeaters, terrestrial radio transmitters, etc... I don't see how flight avionics, which also have to be hardened against increased cosmic radiation and RFI from operating closer to the ionosphere, are so sensitive to relatively low power transmitters.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
While the odds of a crash are minimal - if it's about to happen (and during takeoff and landing the timescales involved can be very short), you can drastically improve your odds if you pay attention.
One that hath name thou can not otter
[...] 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.
Your car is touching the ground. Shielding is easy when you have a solid ground. How, exactly, do you get an effective ground when you're in the air?
There are many possible reasons why electronics of various types should be turned off, most of the covered by the discussion here. However, most importantly, THEY SHOULD BE TURNED OFF BECAUSE THE RULE IS TO TURN THEM OFF. That's right, I'm advocating obeying the rule just because there is a rule. Sounds like I'm some kind of wuss, huh?
We like to think that we are a nation of laws, not men (read about it here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_law or here http://robertdfeinman.com/society/men_not_laws.html. A fundamental premise of this is that everyone is supposed to obey the law. I'm sure everyone can cite examples where this is not so (police giving other police a pass for infractions, etc.) but in general it is a very useful and egalitarian way to order society. We order society so that society is possible. Without order there would be chaos. One way to order society is to have multiple classes of people - you know, the nobles and the peasants. There are some who feel that this is the rightful order of things. Others don't. In the United States, one of the basic premises of our society is that everyone follows the rules. Sure, we know its not always true. But the more we pursue the ideal, the greater the chance that we will come close to it.
I get aggravated every time I see someone flaunt their disrespect for the law, such as when driving in traffic. We've all seen someone cut to the head of a line, etc. Why do we get angry? Well, its not fair, for one thing. For another, most of us recognize that its extremely easy to break the law and we probably wouldn't get "caught" (i.e., punished by some enforcer of the law), but we obey it anyway. We are frustrated with those don't, in part because most of us are smart enough to realize that if we all disregarded those laws, we would have chaos. The rule breaking only works if a very few people do it. So those few people have anointed themselves as somehow being above the rest of us. Nothing is more sure to tick a person off then another person placing themselves above that first person, especially in a society that believes it is egalitarian.
So think about it the next time you are breaking a rule, probably because you think you know it is a harmless infraction. Who are you ticking off with your self-importance? How much are you encouraging others to also choose to bend/break a rule, perhaps one more important? How much are you contributing to disorder and chaos?
Most importantly, how much are you contributing to the kind of thinking exhibited by those like Ms. Huffington who obviously think that "rules are for the little people"?
Your car is touching the ground. Shielding is easy when you have a solid ground. How, exactly, do you get an effective ground when you're in the air?
Your car is insulated from the ground by rubber tires, which is why it's standard to get shocked if you touch a car on a dry, windy day, and why Asians sometimes install ground straps on their cars (well, I've never seen anyone else do it, anyway.) The PCM in the car is shielded by being wrapped in a bunch of metal, just like your PC has a metal case to prevent RFI intrusion... if it is worth a crap. Or at least a metal coating on the plastic parts, for the same purpose.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The danger is that the device could cause interference with an on-board computer. It doesn't need to crash the airplane to be disruptive. Let's say that your iPhone caused the N2 reading for engine #3 to read 0 on takeoff - the pilot would think that the engine had failed and return to the airport for an emergency landing. Everyone would be deplaned and a ground crew would have to examine the engine for a couple of hours just to verify that everything was okay.
Now, let's say the chances of that happening are 1-in-100 million. Well, the level of disruption and the odds of it happening are so poor that a terrorist wouldn't bother. But there are around 100,000 commercial flights, planet-wide, per day. That would mean that every three years you would have an incident like this.
The price we pay to prevent this is that we don't use our electronics for the first 10 and last 20 minutes of flight and we don't use anything that transmits for the entire flight. Personally, I don't think it's that big of a deal.
Have you ever actually left your phone on during a flight?
I have. It doesn't connect to multiple cell towers - it doesn't connect at all, even when you're over a fairly large city.
Posting AC because I broke federal law, and will continue to do so, because cell phones aren't a threat to airplanes, and I don't give a fuck what the law says.
> 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.
I'm an airline pilot, and a colleague of mine (on a Boeing 737/300) once saw his fuel quantity indicators suddenly jump to zero. He asked a cabin attendant to check if anyone was using electronic equipment in the cabin. One passenger, sitting next to the wing, was using a portable CD player. He was asked to turn it off, and fuel quantity indication returned to normal. Switched it back on again... indications went back to zero. The cause of the interference was later determined to be the motor of the CD player, which is rapidly switched on and off to keep a variable speed necessary for reading data at different distances from the center.
Personally, while flying in the cockpit myself, I have forgotten to turn off my cell phone many times. This usually just resulted in a drained battery but no ill effects on the airplane. On a few occasions, it even started ringing during final approach. I never saw any fluctuations in the instrument indications. However, I have heard the typical noise on the radio "trrrrrrrr tkt tkt tkt tkt", which I'm sure pretty much anyone has already heard when a phone was about to ring and it was close to a radio. The instrument landing system receives signals on frequencies pretty close to those of ordinary radio, so I can imagine it being affected in the same way. But I haven't actually seen the needles jump as a result.
In any case, this interference is VERY unlikely to affect the flight controls. Most landings are done manually, so interference should not actually be able to bring down an airplane. However, in foggy weather, the plane is landed automatically and in this case, it's probably safest to just keep all electronics off just in case the autopilot suddenly behaves in some weird way. Planes have crashed because of relatively minor errors in input, for example the radio altimeter reading an altitude that is much too low, and the plane thinking it's above the runway and bringing the power back to idle while in fact it's still at a few hundred feet. That sort of thing. Yes, it can happen, and planes have crashed as a result.
You are quite wrong ... The reason car tyres are black is because they are heavily loaded with carbon to make them conductive. This prevents sparks when refuelling after explosions in the 1920s when white tyres were common. (It also improves wear qualities, but thats not why it was introduced).
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
great home experiment:
you will need 1 GSM phone, another phone to call it, a USB 2 external hard drive, your computer, and a large file.
After attaching the USB-2 cable between your HD and computer, place the GSM phone on or near the cable. I have had success within one or two feet, but for the purposes of your first run, placing the phone on the cable itself is the most likely way to see results.
begin the transfer of the large file.
call the GSM phone.
if the GSM phone receives the call while the file is transferring, the drive should crash. i've encountered blue screens from this experiment in the past.
In 1995 Nasa published a document describing a plethora of mishaps and anomalies related to EMI. These spanned from Saturn 5 rockets to anti-lock braking systems in cars. Some were annoyances, others got people killed. Some were caused by small devices such as phones and others required degraded shielding in combination with military radars.
It seems to describe an overall "you never know" situation.
http://www.cvel.clemson.edu/pdf/nasa-rp1374.pdf
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
>pilots do not wait until the aircraft is 300 feet off
Actually your REQUIRED TO perform full autolands every 90 days in each aircraft in order to keep it certified to perform such landings when you 'really' need its help.
(work for airline, wrote the system that keeps track of the compliance)
Also have been in aircraft cockpit several times during autolands and even performed one myself in the full SIM. It's pretty amazing.
-- Given enough time and money, Microsoft will eventualy invent UNIX.
add a ferrite bead (round lump near the cable end) and it will be fixed.
EASY.
next one, please.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
This is definitely wrong.
First of all regulation make it mandatory to perform Cat. 3 precision landing on autopilot. If the autopilot is not operational you are not authorized for Cat. 3
(Cat. 3 is the one which has the lowest minima, up to Cat. 3 C, which has 0/0 for minima...meaning no minima, you land and stop blind).
Said that yes,. small, light single prop autopilots are just a little more than toys and can't land safely a plane ether in ideal conditions. Big planes do have very sophisticated autoland systems which are in fact able to react to wind shears and other hazards much faster than any human being.
Please study some basic instrumental flight test or have a chat with an airline pilot before saying such nonsense.
I don't think anything would interfere with engine or other instrumentation, as most of that is hard-wired. The problems lie in potential interference with nav radios (primarily VOR and ILS).
As much as I hate to bring Mythbusters into any serious discussion, they brought several electronic devices, aircraft instruments, and a ramp test box (which simulates the aforementioned navigation aids) into a faraday cage to see what they could see.
As I remember, nothing had any effect, except for an attempted cell phone call on a specific frequency that significantly deflected either the VOR or ILS (don't remember which now). Since ILS is what the pilots use to find the runway when they can't see, that would concern me.
Given that the cabin crew can't tell what a given device might be doing, "all off during takeoff/landing, and no cell phones in the air" seems like a totally reasonable policy.
Grounding straps on the back of cars are fairly common to see here in Australia too. Not just Asians. Increasingly rare these days but during the 80s and 90s you saw em everywhere.
I should point out that most of Australia has very low humidity for most of the year. So you get shocked by your car far more often than in many other places. It's summer here at the moment and I can tell you, I've been zapped every single time I get in or out of mine in the last few months. Not so much in winter when the humidity is higher.
You're a little off on this. Just a little though.
I had an app on my Blackberry, that would log every time it connected to a tower. I was using it to track service issues in some rural areas. I accidentally left it on during a trip. According to the log, it did successfully reach towers. Judging by the spread, it wasn't enough to actually maintain a conversation, but it was enough for the tower's ID to be logged. Along the US East coast, it saw approximately 10 towers from Florida to New Jersey. That range was selected, because it excludes all towers received during ascent and descent. As could be expected, there were significantly more towers reached on approach, as this part of the flight involves a longer time at lower altitudes.
When plotting the information, the graphs are horribly polluted by pre and post flight periods, where I was driving around the airports, and in the cities. Driving, I'd see towers very frequently, spaced not more than a few miles apart in rural areas. If the towers were spread more than a few miles apart, there would be a lack of service. For my purposes, it showed where the local poor service areas are, so I'd know where not to attempt to maintain a conversation. The maps still haven't explained why service drops in the elevator at work. :)
Back to your assertion, I've read a number of FAA reports on electronics in-flight. They are the exception, not the rule. The most significant interruptions were due to an odd-ball piece of equipment disturbing the autopilot. For example, a single Nintendo Gameboy would cause the autopilot to enter a slow bank, 5 degrees if I remember correctly. The pilot did work with the flight crew and passengers to identify the unit. They bought the Gameboy from the passenger for further testing. Subsequent tests with numerous Gameboy units identical to the unit in question did not cause the same problem. So, it was an irregularity in a single unit.
The best reason for leaving your cell phone off during flight is your own battery life. When service is weak or nonexistant, your phone increases it's transmit power to try to reach towers. This will run the battery down fairly quickly. You can lose a significant portion of your battery life during a 4 hour flight. If you expect to use your phone when you land, it's a pretty good idea to turn it off before takeoff. Really, why would you leave it on? If you try to use it for anything, the flight crew will get pissy with you, even if you're just playing games with the transmitter off. You're not going to be able to make calls, or send/receive texts, except for maybe a few seconds at a time during flight. So leaving it on, you're just trying to be rebellious. Most of us gave up on such silly things when we were teenagers. "No mom, I won't turn off my phone, and there's nothing you can do about it. I left it on in my pocket. nah-nah. I beat you." See, it's very silly.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.