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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?"
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.
Don't confuse this. Electronics are banned on take off and landing for different reasons, not just for interference. Electronics are banned for radio interference, because that is the easy explanation, but one of the multiple reasons is passenger attention. Take off and landing are, statistically, the most dangerous times, where all passengers are required to be attentive to what goes on. When you take off at night and they dim the cabin lights, some people say that it is for electrical considerations, but it also gets your eyes used to the outside light in case you need to evacuate. Airplanes and procedures are carefully planned so that you can evacuate quickly in case of an emergency, and people being distracted form electronics isn't really a good idea.
The urgent is done, the impossible is on the way, for miracles expect a small delay.
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...
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!
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?
You do realize you are spouting nonsense?
The interference bit is pure BS. This has been debunked for a couple of decades now.
Attentive at take of and landing. Take off, people are still doing everything but being ready to sprint to the exit. Landing there are three things going on. The people planning the ultimate grab over head bag and bolt down to exit. The parents trying to calm the screaming kid. And the rest stare out the window. All of which have nothing to do with BRACE BRACE BRACE FIRE BALL.
Dimming the cabin lights for take off is simply a calming step to subconsciously tell people to settle down. It has nothing at all to do with escape or electrical consideration. Having a calm cabin removes a lot of stress points for cabin crew. For example calm people are less likely to decide to go to the can. It allows cabin crew to achieve the most they can in a short time frame. It also reduces the risk of people with flying fears from freaking out. If every one is settled the people on the edge will also likely be more inclined to be calmer. It has ZIP to due with quick exit.
As an aside. Any aircraft situation where the passengers and crew have time to plan for an event is almost always a long developing situation. Long as in several tens of minutes. Sudden take off and sudden landing events rarely have more than a few seconds warning if any.
Sorry but I worked in the industry for many many years and quite frankly most of the "safety" procedures are purely a show. They are pacifiers to give the illusion of safety.
In airport security and safety procedures are even more farcical. But that is not the point of this thread.
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.
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.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
>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.
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.
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.