Time to Review FAA Gadget Policies

Nick Bilton, Lead Technology writer for The New York Times Bits Blog, called the FAA to complain about its gadget policies on flights and got an unexpected reply. Laura J. Brown, deputy assistant administrator for public affairs, said that it might be time to change some of those policies and promised they'd take a “fresh look” at the use of personal electronics on planes. From the article: "Yes, you read that correctly. The F.A.A., which in the past has essentially said, 'No, because I said so,' is going to explore testing e-readers, tablets and certain other gadgets on planes. The last time this testing was done was 2006, long before iPads and most e-readers existed. (The bad, or good, news: The F.A.A. doesn’t yet want to include the 150 million smartphones in this revision.)"

Comments

About time common sense prevailed!

[SultanCemil]

Obviously, electronic devices can't bring down a plane. Millions of fliers every week "forget" to turn off their devices, and nary a plane goes down. Can common sense finally prevail? Arbitrary rules reduce respect for the necessary ones. For example: No headphones during take-off? Makes perfect sense - take-off is one of the most sensitive times of the flight. If someone needs to yell directions, you need to hear them. Reading a book on your Kindle? Not so much.

Having said that, of course, if my plane is going down, I'd probably take off my headphones. YMMV.

Re:About time common sense prevailed!

[pz]

The reason you should not be reading your kindle, or have a laptop out during takeoff and landing, or any reasonably hard-edged, dense object is that it has the potential to become a projectile upon sudden deceleration. The less crap raining horizontally through the cabin upon impact, the better the chances of survivability.

Re:About time common sense prevailed!

[green1]

citation please?
I've never read a documented case like that, I'm genuinely curious.

Re:About time common sense prevailed!

[chrb]

NASA anonymous reporting system.... "So what would you think if you were the B777 pilot who's radio communication with air traffic control was interrupted by a passenger's cell phone call? Or if you were the captain in command of a B747 that unexpectedly lost autopilot after takeoff and did not get it back until 4, count 'em four passengers turned off their portable electronic devices?" http://christinenegroni.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/handhelds-on-airplanes-bigger-problem.html

"In 2007, one pilot recounted an instance when the navigational equipment on his Boeing 737 had failed after takeoff. A flight attendant told a passenger to turn off a hand-held GPS device and the problem on the flight deck went away." http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/business/18devices.html

Re:About time common sense prevailed!

[0123456]

So what would you think if you were the B777 pilot who's radio communication with air traffic control was interrupted by a passenger's cell phone call? Or if you were the captain in command of a B747 that unexpectedly lost autopilot after takeoff and did not get it back until 4, count 'em four passengers turned off their portable electronic devices?

I would think that Boeing did a piss-poor job of protecting the aircraft against interference.

Clearly terrorists are stupid when they try to sneak bombs on board; a dozen of them should bring iPads and iPhones onto a flight and turn them all on at the same time during takeoff.

Re:About time common sense prevailed!

[dgatwood]

Radio communication with ATC is an analog band just above FM radio, and involves shielded cables running from a shielded radio to one or more antennas located outside the body of the aircraft (which is a Faraday cage at those frequencies unless one of the doors is open, and probably even then).

Based on that, I'd rate the odds of a cell phone call interfering with an ATC call just south of the odds of getting hit by a meteor while dancing the Macarena. Actually, scratch that. It's more like the odds of dancing the Macarena creating a statistically significant increase in your risk of getting hit by a meteor.

The problem with using incident reports as a means of determining whether something is safe or not is that correlation is not causation. The fact that the autopilot came back online after four people shut off their laptops does not mean that those laptops caused the failure. It means that the autopilot came back on after those laptops were disabled. In much the same way, it rained in the SF Bay Area after I used the bathroom this morning, so obviously my toilet causes rain.... It's a lot more likely that the autopilot kicked out due to a transient problem in some sensor, a frozen pitot tube that thawed out, a power surge that caused a self-resetting circuit interruptor to temporarily shut off power to a critical piece of equipment, or some other temporary problem that went away on its own.

However, it is human nature to look for and see patterns even when they don't exist. Thus, after years of being told that electronics can cause planes to misbehave, people immediately assume that somebody's MP3 player is at fault whenever something unexplainable happens on an aircraft. The flight crew tells people to shut down their electronics. After a while, things start working again, so the flight crew then assumes that those electronics caused the problem when the evidence supporting that conclusion is flimsy at best and nonexistent at worst. That doesn't prevent it from being reported as an incident, though.

If you really want useful data, the flight crew needs to tell those passengers to turn that equipment back on and see if the problem recurs. If it does, then it probably contributed to the problem. If it does not, it probably did not. The problem is that nobody wants to do this because they're too afraid that turning it back on might bring the plane down. And this is why incident reports are nearly useless as a means of determining safety.

Re:About time common sense prevailed!

[green1]

Was any followup ever done on any of those 35 cases to see if the cell phones were actually the cause of the interference?

Incident reports of that form are simply "the crew says this happened"... it would be a lot more convincing if some followup was done to see if it was actually cell phone interference, or other interference that just happened to abate some time after a known cell phone was turned off.

It should be noted that the study linked stated that they weren't able to reproduce the results. Additionally the test they did that did show some interference had several unlikely assumptions. First of all, the equipment they used was that used in general aviation, not commercial aviation. It was also all old and outdated equipment unlikely to be in use on any airliner. Additionally the cell phone had to be on maximum power (I'm also not sure where they found a cell phone with a maximum power of 2 watts! I haven't seen one that powerful since the old brick phones of the late 1980s!) and less than 30cm from the equipment before it caused any interference.

Hardly a reliable study for the current situation we are discussing.

Re:About time common sense prevailed!

[joe_frisch]

I have personally observed interference from a camera (Nikon D70) on the navigation instruments on my Bonanza (caused the VOR needle to jump - we were in visual conditions at the time so it wasn't a problem). Of course airliner avionics is better - but we need the odds of substantial interference to be about 1 in a million for it not to be a safety risk.

It is true that many passengers fail to turn of electronics, but remember that the transmit power adds from all the devices. It is possible that 400 cell phones on a plane would be a more serious problem than the few that weren't turned off.

--- Joe Frisch

Re:About time common sense prevailed!

[MacGyver2210]

A blogger citing one instance of a handheld GPS system interfering with the plane-mounted one? Gee, that's a whole lot of trouble given the last ~100 years of flying and how little PEDs have done to cause problems on planes.

In the immortal words of Toby from The West Wing:

Flight Attendant on AF1: "Sir you need to put away your phone, we're about to take off."
Toby: "If my $36 phone from Radio Shack can bring down Air Force One, we have bigger problems than we thought."

Re:About time common sense prevailed!

[MacGyver2210]

But they don't care if you have your electronics out. They don't care if you're holding your iPod. They just want it turned off.

Re:About time common sense prevailed!

[hal2814]

" Seriously. Just shut your fucking iPad off for five minutes."

Tell that to the pilots and crew who are using them now instead of lugging around a flight bag full of charts. Their iPad is the same one you can buy anywhere. If their which are sitting right in the cockpit aren't gumming up the works, I fail to see how mine magically will.

Re:About time common sense prevailed!

[mcrbids]

As a pilot, takeoff is not at all a sensitive time of flight. Pretty much, you mash the gas all the way forwardward, and keep the plane pretty much in line with the runway. (yawn)

The sensitive part is LANDING the plane! Here, you are actually aiming at the ground with minimal power right up to the last 10 seconds or so, where you pull the nose up just inches off the ground and (if all goes well) allow the loss of speed to force the wings to stop producing enough lift to stay airborne.

It's merely a matter of practice to do safely, but it's *tough* to do elegantly every time. Every pilot blows a landing and bounces or comes down rough every so often.

But again, that's the *pilot* that we're talking about. Personally, I wouldn't care 1 whit about what the passengers do during the landing sequence.

Re:About time common sense prevailed!

[427_ci_505]

The solution to this is to have a million terrorists board the plane.

Re:What's so bad about their policies?

[FatAlb3rt]

You can ban pretty much anything in the name of safety.

Familiar territory

[Virtucon]

I've been involved in this for a long time, including the Supplemental Type Certification and FAA processes to get WiFi on aircraft. Most of what happens to get you to turn them off during takeoff and landing has little to do with interference, it's to get your attention and to get you to follow directions. All of that is really important to your safety more-so than a nudeo-scan 5000 operated by the TSA. The other aspects such as Cellular Phone use during flights also isn't a technical risk to the aircraft but the annoyance factor to other passengers as well as coordination possibilities for terrorist activities.. Think "Ackbar we're over Chicago, what do I do?" That's why the damn in-flight position tracking on larger aircraft suddenly turns off when you're close to arrival. Some of this is a bit silly because we've allowed WiFi on planes and you can log into flight tracker or use the GOGO website to track where you are. The safety feature there is that it shuts off below 10,000 feet automatically and there's always a breaker in the cockpit that the pilots can use to shut it off.

If the FAA wants to review this then great but there's a lot more to it than just "possible" interference with aircraft systems and I don't expect that the airlines will open up the floodgates and let you use anything you want, when you want either just because of the annoyance issues.

Re:Familiar territory

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, it has nothing to do with terrorists. Where did you even get that idea from?

The reason is this: statistically speaking, altitudes below 10,000 feet are far more dangerous than higher altitudes. Most accidents occur during takeoff/landing and given that transponders are not required below 10,000 unless within controlled airspace and/or within a Mode C veil, it makes the lower altitudes a fairly dangerous area. Hence why Personal Electronic Devices (PEDs) are prohibited below 10,000 feet and sterile cockpit procedures are enforced any time the aircraft is below 10,000 feet.

Why then can passengers continue to listen to music and watch TV through the aircraft's on-board entertainment system at altitudes below 10,000 feet? The answer is that all of those systems have a built-in feature that disables (pauses, mutes, etc) them when a PA is made. PEDs do not have that ability which is why they are prohibited below 10,000 feet.

Read Advisory Circular 91-21.1B (specifically states that the FCC mandates the ban on using mobile phones while airborne), 14 CFR 121.306, and 14 CFR 121.542(c) for further information.

Re:some parts are fine

[Nursie]

While I agree with what you're saying, and think it may be a good idea it doesn't seem to be the point of the rule -

I'm perfectly allowed to read a hardcover book during these times.

The other side of the story

[chrb]

"Earlier this year, aviation journalist Christine Negroni obtained a copy of a confidential report from the International Air Transport Association that indicated the use of personal electronics on commercial aircraft had interfered with flight deck operations in 75 instances over the past seven years.

What kind of problems? I’m not sure you want to know. All cockpit systems were affected, flight controls, communication, navigation and emergency warnings. . . .

And

The use of PEDs [Personal Electronic Devices. –DS] on board will not – I repeat – will not cause a plane to go tumbling through the sky like something in a made-for-TV-disaster movie. What PEDs can and in fact have already done, is create a distraction for the flight crew. When that distraction comes at the wrong time it can lead to pants-wetting episodes and maybe even disaster. And that is why boys and girls, devices are supposed to be turned off as in OFF, below 10 thousand feet. The concept is that with sufficient altitude below us there is time to address any pesky error messages that might wind up being transmitted to the cockpit. Only now we know that those messages are pretty darn common."

Handhelds on Airplanes a Bigger Problem Than You Think

Re:The other side of the story

[rwa2]

Word.

It doesn't even really matter if the device is capable of creating interference. The fact is, when the aircraft suddenly jumps and the lights flicker out and the oxygen masks drop from the overhead compartments, everyone and their flight attendants are going to be glaring down with dirty looks at the guy with the little glowing electronic device, thinking "what the FUCK did you DO?!" and they're not going to care one bit what the answer is. Not even the NTSB report that comes out months later is going to vindicate him or ease that guilt one bit.

Yeah, I used to be that guy. :-P

Re:The other side of the story

[meerling]

You have to wonder about the planes when they claim they are vulnerable to em interference from a device who's em radiation is less than that of your watch, the microwave in the onplane galley, the lightning bolts that go off even on clear days, or the radio station 150 miles away.

(Not all devices have this kind of shielding, but some do. Anything with wifi turned on definitely do NOT.)

Re:The other side of the story

[0123456]

This raises a very serious question: Why are airplane electronics not designed for noise immunity? It seems like such an obvious solution, like adding security doors to the cockpit after 9/11.

To be fair, much as it should be the airline's job to ensure the aircraft can't be affected, replacing the cockpit door is a heck of a lot easier than replacing aircraft avionics or rewiring them to prevent interference. Even before you consider the cost of the new hardware, that could require taking the aircraft out of service for weeks at a cost of six figures or more of lost revenue per week.

Newer aircraft should be more robust, but the older ones will be around for decades yet.

Re:The other side of the story

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I am not sure what you are talking about when you mention the EM radiation from your watch. That should either be essentially zero, in the case of an analog watch, or... well still essentially zero, if you are talking about an LCD watch. Unless you have a fancy "smart watch" which plays MP3s or something... I don't think anyone claimed a plane was vulnerable to less radiation than your watch puts out.

That said, since some devices can and do cause interference, the default should be "don't allow", and then certain devices (or even classes of devices) can be allowed after extensive testing. The onboard microwave, you can be sure, received many many hours of testing, and is probably a special model, with special shielding. They also control when and how it is operated. For example, let's say the GPS goes out every time the microwave is run - they know how to restore it if needed, and they know why it is out. If that kind of thing happens randomly and uncontrollably due to some combination of consumer devices, that's a different situation.

Lightning bolts have a tremendous amount of energy, but are very, very brief. Other than creating some static on analog radio communications, they don't usually cause much interference. (Unless they strike you, then they can cause circuit failure).

Radio stations are a known quantity, since they are pretty much always operating in the same locations, frequencies, and power levels. The airplane is also so far away from them most of the time, that the power level is very low. A much weaker signal (like the WiFi from my laptop) can be much stronger in the interior of airplane, given that it's much closer. Also, let's not forget that the airplane is a metal box, it blocks out outside signals for the most part, and keeps inside signals bouncing around longer.

Re:The other side of the story

[Baloroth]

On the other hand, TFA says

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration collects reports from pilots of incidents related to electronic devices. Of 50 incidents in the most recent report check from last year, few had anything to do with cockpit interference. Mostly it was reports of people who simply didn’t turn off their device or laptop batteries overheating, not of any kind of interference from those devices.

Those incidents that were related to the plane’s avionics were purely speculation. For example, in one report, a fuel gauge on a Boeing 757 was not working properly during takeoff, but began working again when the plane was landing. The report says the pilot “suspects” a possible electronic device on the plane caused the interference. The pilot admitted he did not do any testing.

In other words, there is absolutely zero evidence that the device is a cause of interference. There are, of course, numerous examples of pilots claiming they caused interference, with no scientific evidence ever backing up those claims (I am, in fact, not aware of any such scientific results whatsoever.) Remember, correlation != causation... and every all the instances of interference is anecdotal and correlative at best. If the devices cause interference, than you should be able to replicate it scientifically. Until someone does, I'm calling it BS.

Re:The other side of the story

[Nidi62]

This raises a very serious question: Why are airplane electronics not designed for noise immunity?

You have to realize that most aircraft in service have been in service for decades. For example, Boeing 737s first came out in 1968. MD-88s/90s came out in 79/95. Except for the MD-90, these planes were designed and produced when a "personal electronic device" was a radio set that would fit on a table, maybe an 8-track or cassette player. It wasn't really expected that they'd run into much interference from passenger devices. It is very hard and expensive to retrofit aircraft already in service as well as to adjust production lines. A lot of people don't realize that the plane they're flying in very possibly was designed and built before they were born.

Re:The other side of the story

[WrecklessSandwich]

Agreed, retrofitting is less than practical in this case. However, this should have been happening with new designs at least since cell phones have been prevalent.

Re:The other side of the story

[Ihmhi]

It's a bit difficult to find the information on how many flights there are in the US per year, but this article states that in 2004 there were 6,830,000 airplane flights in the US. I'm going to use an even smaller number - 5,000,000 - as a baseline.

In 7 years - 35,000,000 flights - we have had something go wrong due to said devices 75 times, or around 0.000214% of the time. Is it really worth inconveniencing everyone when the number is that remote?

Re:The other side of the story

[MacGyver2210]

You're referring to a blogger, who admittedly also wrote a piece for the NYT, but she is basing all of this on a "confidential" report by a public safety agency(FOIA request anyone?) and 10 anonymous tips to a website.

While I certainly believe that electronics can have an effect on other electronics, I in no way believe that a PED is capable of disrupting any mission-critical system on a modern commercial airliner. This comes from the background of a computer scientist, electrical engineer, and a pilot. The notion that a small portable device could do anything more than interfere with radio communications in a plane is nonsense.

First, there is absolutely no way a phone or similar device can disable autopilot unless it is somehow connected to the avionics systems. The autopilot activation doesn't base anything on radio communications, and all of the aircraft electronics are in fact heavily RF shielded. To trip up an autopilot, a PED would have to somehow disturb the gyroscopes controlling the instrumentation that feeds data to the AP. As these are primarily controlled by independent vacuum systems and physical gyroscopes behind the dials, that seems rather unlikely.

The digital components of the AP, such as RNAV/GPS or an FMC-Managed system would have a slim to nil possibility of interference - however it would not deactivate the AP. It would just return it to pilot control instead of computer control. A pilot that actually has to fly a plane instead of watching the AP do it for him? Oh the horror, oh the humanity!

A majority of the systems even on a modern airplane are mechanical, not electronic. They may have some electronic components to them, but those are usually just to relay the data to a computer monitoring system. They don't affect the primary display or the true value of the instrument readout(unless you're the flight log computer). Do you really think my Kindle is going to kill your fuel pump? Or the hydraulic system? Or the Cabin Pressure Control System? Or the heating pack? Or the FADEC in the engines all the way out on the wing? Or the landing gear?

No. The most it's going to do is add a little static to a radio communication(if miraculously my WiFi radio has a stronger signal than the plane, on a completely unrelated band). These rules are long overdue for reconsideration.

Re:The other side of the story

[beanpoppa]

If they just used that as there reasoning- that they require everyone to pay attention, then they would have more credibility. However, they give the bogus excuse that it's for interference, that they lose all credibility. They confiscate my toothpaste and nail trimmers in the name of safety, and I'm supposed to believe that my ereader will bring down the plane and they let it slide?

Re:The other side of the story

[ozmanjusri]

Despite what libertards like to believe, in cases like this devices are dangerous until proven safe, not the other way around.

But sometimes it's not clear who they present a danger to.

We're all told to turn off our phones for our own safety, because self-interest is the most persuasive argument available.

Imagine however that you're a network provider with cell-phone towers on flight lines to a major airport. Each tower has to be built to acquire, then hand over more than three hundred simultaneous connections in just a few seconds as each plane passes over. And that's in addition to your real network traffic.

Wouldn't you rather just build the heavy-duty infrastructure in one place (at the airport) and tell everybody to switch their phones on once they've landed?

Re:The other side of the story

[flyingfsck]

Yup, that is exactly what it is about. The restriction on phone use in flight is to protect the cell phone towers.

Re:The other side of the story

[techno-vampire]

A lot of people don't realize that the plane they're flying in very possibly was designed and built before they were born.

Really? That's very interesting. I didn't know they were building jet airliners during WWII.

Re:The other side of the story

[Technician]

The biggest issue was with FM radios. The desired station is mixed with the local oscillator in the radio to make the Intermediate Frequency of 10.7 Mhz for the filters and FM detector.

This is not a problem with the hardness of the electronics on the plane. This issue is the local osc on many portable radios is not 100% shielded and is 10.7 Mhz above the FM station. This places a Transmitter on the air in the plane on the frequency band for aircraft communication. Many MP3 players, media players, cell phones etc, have an FM tuner. Often the tuner remains on, even when the device is playing other media.

The air distress frequency is 121.5 Mhz. Listening to an FM station on 110.8 will put the LO smack dab on frequency. This is the reason why no FM stations operate on even 100 Khz frequencies. Other aircraft frequencies are within the local oscillator range of FM radios. 105.3 FM will put the local oscillator on 116.4 MHZ in the aircraft band.

References..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_distress_frequency
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate_frequency

Re:What's so bad about their policies?

[Keebler71]

.. and whose job is it to maintain the list of which of the hundreds of thousands of consumer electronic devices comply and which failed? And do you expect the flight attendants to be able to tell the difference between every one? How do you implement this? Maybe a nice little (easily forged) sticker for the back of the device?

Oh stop

[Sycraft-fu]

People trot this tired line out again and again with NO BACKING. If that is the case why isn't the order then "Everything must be put away for takeoff, no electronics, books, or anything else may be in your hands." They don't mind if you have a book out, I've done it many a time. Guess what? A book, particularly a hard cover one, will do more damage than a phone, yet only electronics are banned. That is not the reason for the ban. Sorry, try again (or just go look at the FAA's actual policies, they aren't a secret).