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Wi-Fi Shown To Interfere With Aircraft Systems
lukehopewell1 writes "It's official: using Wi-Fi on a plane can interfere with a pilot's navigational equipment, according to airline equipment manufacturers Honeywell Avionics and Boeing today. Boeing confirmed to ZDNet Australia that the issue does exist, but said it has not delivered any planes suffering the fault. 'Blanking of the Phase 3 Display Units has been reported during airline EMI (electromagnetic interference) certification testing of wireless broadband systems on various Next-Generation 737 aeroplanes,' Boeing said."
The navigational equipment should be designed so it is tolerant of this sort of interference.
The West Wing had a quote from Toby Ziegler that essentially sums up how I feel about this:
Toby Ziegler: "We're flying in a Lockheed Eagle series L1011. It came off the line 20 months ago. It carries a Sim-5 Transponder tracking system. Are you telling me I can still flummox this thing with something I bought at Radio Shack?"
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
So they're saying that terrorists could bring down planes just by texting each other furiously?
I can't imagine a wireless signal interfering with a hardwired display this badly, so is this more an issue with wifi interfering with various sensors that feed the display, causing the system to momentarily "blank" the screen rather than present spurious and inaccurate data?
(Yes I did RTFA)
"Raspberry. There's only one man who would dare give me the raspberry: Lone Star!"
Not only is it for one specific module, its only at elevated power levels, not typical power levels. Lets watch the corporate media fuck this up and turn into a scare tactic to show more ads to morons.
http://www.flightglobal.com/articles/2011/03/10/354179/wi-fi-interference-with-honeywell-avionics-prompts-boeing.html
Grounded? It's on a goddamn airplane.
they need to build airplanes out of brick, or concrete
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
So? Why should reality get in the way of Slashdotters claiming to have a "simple" fix so they can run their wi-fi and text people wherever they want?
Because, obviously, the input of random geeks on Slashdot is far more informed than the people who actually make these things and have to build them.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Hey didn't we see something about a network that works in the optical spectrum not to long ago. Seems like a good idea on an airliner.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
So the company just admitted that their (likely expensive) aviation equipment (displays?) are more error prone from EMI than say....my desktop pc...phone...digital watch? What sort of equipment are these people working with? Consumer electronics are bombarded by this sort of EMI constantly and I don't see any displays blanking in my office. In an airplane I would have assumed they would have to have MORE shielding because at altitude they have less shield from solar radiation which is well known for being harmful to electronics where my wifi adapter hasn't fried a single piece of electronics...yet. This still sounds like total BS to me.
I dunno. This seems like something with a terribly simple fix...
JUST DON'T USE WIFI.
If you want networking in an aircraft, do it with wired Ethernet.
Of course this screws over all of the most hyped devices but that's life sometimes.
[Nelson] Ha Ha! [/Nelson]
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Flying from Heathrow to Johannesburg on British Airways, the stewardess explicitly said Flight Mode was not acceptable("turn the device off even if the device has a flight mode"), the device had to be off. Flying back from Johannesburg to Amsterdam on KLM, the stewardess explicitly said Flight Mode was acceptable ("turn the device off or put it into flight mode"). The outbound flight was on a 747-400 and the flight back was on a 777-200.
I can make a Tesla coil out of $50 of junk surplus parts and destroy a roomful of the highest end electronic equipment in the world. Hell, a simple spark gap in the right place can cause a world of hurt.
RF energy doesn't give a fuck where you bought something.
You cannot fully shield a device that is specifically designed to receive external signals. In aerospace there's guys who do nothing but electromagnetic compatibility engineering, and not all the threats are external. Sometimes the third side lobe of your strike radar reflects off a rib in the fuselage and the seventh harmonic frequency takes out your very sensitive radar altimeter during initial power up tests.
Actually my experience (in Europe) is that during start/landing, all electronic gadgets are disallowed, even MP3 players. Once in the sky, only active transmitters are disallowed.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
There are no English words that contain "ww".
Aww. :(
Some years ago I was in a plane ready to take off when the cabin informed of "technical difficulties"
They went searching in a particular area of the seats and found someone who had forgot to turn off his phone before leaving his coat in the luggage compartment(*). It was more educational than a ton of posters asking me to turn off my cell phone.
So... well, let's say that I am that moron that will ask you politely to stop talking when the plane is going to start the take off, even if that means interfering with your freedom to do whatever you want to do, whenever and wherever. And I will keep doing, thank you very much.
Then, from my part, we are not going to use phone in planes. Never. If we are not going to use the phones while in the plane, the only caveat to giving it to an steward would be finding a good method that assures me that I will recover my phone without problems neither much delays when I arrive at my destination.
(*): Yes, you sometime did leave your phone on and nothing happened. I did forget to turn it off sometime, too. And probably if the phone of that guy had been in his pocket it would not have been detected. Or maybe it was somewhat defective. But I do not like to increase any chance of an accident for anything as trivial as what you could say in your phone.
If you want a car analogy, you can blame the government for limiting your freedom of getting drunk at a party and getting back home driving your car. And most of the times, if you do, nothing bad will happen. But that does not mean that it is not a stupid risk.
Why can't
flawwed isn't a word in English but there ARE English words that have the "ww" combo, that combination was fairly rare and you often tend to see them separated into word phrases but glowworm, powwow, and arrowwood are real words in English.
But there is one word which is quite common -- if you consider acronyms to be "real" words (and only Scrabble seems to think they aren't) -- then WWW is probably the most common.
By that logic half the words in the average English speaker's vocabulary aren't "English words".