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FAA To Reevaluate Inflight Electronic Device Use
coondoggie writes "If you have been on a commercial airline, the phrase 'The use of any portable electronic equipment while the aircraft is taxiing, during takeoff and climb, or during approach and landing,' is as ubiquitous but not quite as tedious as 'make sure your tray tables are in the secure locked upright position.' But the electronic equipment restrictions may change. The Federal Aviation Administration today said it was forming a government-industry group to study the current portable electronic device use policies commercial aviation use to determine when these devices can be used safely during flight."
"The Federal Aviation Administration today said it was forming a government-industry group to study" = no changes for at least 5 years.
I don't see why it has to be all-or-nothing.
Readers, tablets, mp3 players? Cool.
Mobile phone conversations? No way.
And they probably don't need any justification, but they could just say, "we need to keep the obnoxious chatter to a minimum during those times so people will hear instructions and announcements from the crew."
getting hit in the head by a flying laptop after a hard stop.
Once upon a time I would get to work and break into sections a 300 page printout and then leave it in my bosses office. One day I stayed to talk to my boss and watched at they transfered all 300 pages from there inbox to the trash. So I did a lttle research and it turned out a supervisor who had retiered over 10 years ago had wanted that report. One division of the compay ran that report off every day and had it shipped to where I was at. Then somenone in my building had the job of breaking it up into sections and puting it in an IN BOX, for more than 10 years after the need for the report was gone. Everyone was very happy when I told them to stop running that report.
Someone probably had a very good reason for making people put things away on a flight back in 1933 and now no one knows why. Everything now is a justification of a policy that they have always enforced.
vi +
Yup. I put mine in Airplane Mode and just put it to sleep. No sense in wasting battery on the 3G connection attempts or blowing through towers at the cost of other people's connections but I'm certainly not going to wait for my phone to boot up at landing to send a SMS to the person coming to pick me up.
It's bullshit and everyone has known it forever. We've already had a very large panel of experts prove this is a non-issue for over a decade. Let's not waste time now.
The FAA previously barred pilots from taking off if it MIGHT rain and it MIGHT be below freezing at altitude. Even during the summer, its easy to hit freezing temps in many planes. And year around, its impossible to fly where there isn't a slight change of rain. Yes, that was in the last five years. The regulation didn't last long. Right now the head of the FAA is not a pilot. He is a bureaucrat and is fairly clueless.
Its also pretty easy to prove the FAA makes flying more dangerous. The FAA literally keeps safety equipment out of planes. Their regulations prevent free market economics from applying to most things aviation. You want safer, cheaper flying, demand the FAA be cut and size and concentrate on pilot requirements and commercial aviation. The FAA literally doubles the cost of all things aviation.
Better yet would be for airline staff to start cracking down on this. Screaming baby that isn't quiet in 5 minutes -> kicked off the plane.
You'd see that problem disappear really fast.
You really don't have that much bandwidth to hand around. Depending on radio conditions you might have 100kb/s - for everyone to share.
Sez who?
LTE can easily reach 6 miles, with acceptable performance at 18 miles. WiMax can push to 30 miles.
So simply optimizing an LTE radio for vertical lobes in addition to horizontal will easily service a couple hundred phones
thru an on-board femtocell, or an onboard wifi router.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Are we seeing 450 crashes a day? Are we even seeing 1/1000th of that? Nope. [...] Well, looks like you're an idiot, and electronic devices are perfectly fine.
Keep in mind that you do have human beings in charge of airplanes who can usually figure around these things. Airplanes do have a few redundancies for things. You also have Air Traffic Controllers who check these things
Also, NASA has their ASRS database. It's a volunteer thing--pilots, FAs, etc report these things to NASA which keeps track of them. Because of this, this is certainly not an exhaustive list. For entertainment value, do a text search on PED in the narrative, though, and you'll see various cases where passenger electronic devices are believed to have affected the instruments.
Of course, there's no direct connection. These people aren't trying to prove or disprove anything. If there's a problem, they tell passengers to turn off electronic devices. If the problem goes away, it was the device. Also, some of the reported issues are with older planes--737s, MD80s, etc.--which may actually have issues versus a brand new Boeing 767 or Airbus A380. Also, from the equipment involved, your cheap-ass Dell may have a problem that my beautiful MacBook Pro doesn't have--or, if you prefer, your cheap-ass laptop may have more shielding than my super-thin less-is-more MacBook Air. Not to mention that air travel is international and a phone used by a Chinese or Australian person might not have the same requirements as a phone sold here in the states. Add to that overlapping radio problems--the interference only occurs when I'm using my iPhone in seat 23F and you're using your PSP in seat 17A.
There's no way to take all of these factors into account.
Nothing like passengers, that's you people, telling me in the cockpit how there is no interference. You are correct, if your mobile is a CDMA device, I won't hear it in my headset, but GSM is another matter, AT&T's frequency band being the worst offender. Granted the interference is subtle, but the "tower pinging" is most definitely there. Not all the time, typically around 10,000' and below. But please continue to explain how it doesn't bother me, or my fellow pilots. After all, you are the paying customer, and the customer is always correct.