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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."
I'd rather you were blabbing on the phone than talking to me.
with half a dozen mobile devices, or more - and most of them are on w/ cell signal while I'm flying...
They really should review that policy.
I'm ok with the FAA loosening up on those poor, persecuted, electromagnetic waves that have historically been singled out for persecution and discrimination.
However, I would like to see the draconian measures previously reserved for in-flight electronics applied with redoubled fury against those who have the temerity to emit high volume and/or pitch sound waves, or substantial levels of visible-range electromagnetic radiation during nighttime hours. Those are the true hazard to consumer aviation.
Permit wifi and crack down on screaming children.
Because the reason they are banned isn't because of electromagnetic emissions, but rather because it is a crowd control technique. There's nothing special about the first 10 and last 10 minutes of a flight, other than it's the most likely time for a plane to crash land. The regulation is all about causing passengers to pay attention to flight attendants and nothing to do with avionics.
Didn't Mythbusters cover this?
Yes.
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
I would bet that more than 50% of devices on planes are already left on for takeoff and landing. The only thing being turned off is the screen.
What's the big deal?
Its mostly fear mongering FUD. We aren't exactly suffering from a lack of it. I'm sure we'll invent a new reason.
Another is what amounts to electrical smog makes it irrelevant over the developed world. Yeah, sure, from a EE perspective a microwatt level kindle is a big problem compared to a 100 kilowatt class TV transmitter.
The other thing is assuming you believe in the terrorist behind every tree stump mythos, the problem is intentional radiators are available at power levels 60 to 90 dB higher than your average unintentional radiator. So if you want a chance in hell of operating flight instruments thru an "attack" by someone with a hand held radio transmitter, you are inherently utterly impervious to the 90 dB down levels of any pacifistic consumer device.
I would like to see a new procedure for flying replacing the FUD with a genuine interference FAA and TSA reported emergency light and procedure. So in the infinitely unlikely event someone intentionally or unintentionally caused a problem, they'd track it. Not just untracked voodoo like now "well, we don't know why, but the VOR rx was acting up so we assume it must have been passenger electronics"
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Hey, wait. Why is this post adjacent to "How Long Do You Want to Live?"
Second paragraph in the article. "The group however will not "consider the airborne use of cell phones for voice communications during flight.""
I used to travel for a living and I couldn't begin to tell you how many times I saw people leave their portable electronic devices on. Whether this was an accident or not I couldn't tell you of course, but I would have to imagine that if you were extrapolate a dozen cell phones a flight by a couple thousand flights a day etc.....
Point being that there is overwhelming real world evidence that portable electronic devices just don't bring airliners. If that was actually the case we would have had airliners falling out of the sky on a daily basis every day for many years now. The rules for turning the devices off have no basis in reality and are as outdated as the manual typewriter. They need overturned and left in the dustbin of history...
Not this again. This has been discussed to death. If they do not ask people to put away regular books, why should I be asked to put away my ebook reader. Either make a consistent rule that one should put away any sort of distraction away, for the sake of situation awareness or dont prohibit anything.
I don't think they'll reduce the restrictions much, if at all. If it were truly a case about interference and radio waves, then why do they have phones on the planes, tv's built into every head rest, and large tv's in front of the isles? All of those electronics are just fine to use whenever because you have to pay for them. If they start letting us use all of our own stuff up there then that'll be less profit.
There are multiple issues here. First off, the issue is about crowd control. THEY control all the on-board electronics, and can turn them off at whim. This way, they can always ensure they have the attention of passengers, and can disable any malfunctioning electronics equipment.
Second, they have phones on the planes that are air-to-land or air-to-satellite linked, through a single antenna. The phone systems are shielded. Compare this to cellular phones, which ramp up signal strength depending on how far they are from the nearest cell. Plus, cell phones aren't meant to be used at those speeds; during takeoff and landing, the plane is close to the ground, but moving fast -- meaning constant hop from cell to cell, requiring signal boost from both the towers and the phones, potentially interrupting navigational equipment (the disruption would be just as much from the ground cells as from the phones).
This brings us to the third point: flight attendants are not EM experts, nor can they identify every electronic gadget made in the past 20 years at a glance. Much easier to have a blanket ban on devices than to have to figure out what sort of radio each device has inside, and what sort of potential EM output the device has.
So, the FAA has approved a few airline-controlled methods of communication and entertainment, and banned everything else.
Personally, I've always wondered why they seem to allow paperbacks, magazines and newspapers during takeoff and landing, even though they tell people to stow all their loose belongings.
Cell phone use on commercial flights aren't banned because of the disruption they do to the airplane, they are banned because of the disruption they will do to the cell network. At 30,000 feet, your cell phone will attempt to connect to 100's of cells at once. This obviously causes network congestion. If people really did turn off their phones during commercial flights, we would have more cell bandwidth on the ground.
Right, because terrorists would not attack anything were there laws prohibiting such attacks, ergo they would obey the electronics restrictions were they in place. The ONLY thing stopping them right now is not the fear of being killed by legitimate passengers, but the silly restriction against using electronics which CAN NOT and DO NOT interfere with properly-installed-and-maintained avionics.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Funny my last international long haul flight completely independent of the FAA had the flight attendants tell us that not only were we allowed to turn on electronic devices but we were also allowed to turn off flight mode and make use of the in-plane WiFi for internet and to make phone calls from our mobiles.
Worse even the rates were reasonable, imagine that!
EM concerns are a throwback to the 90s where people didn't have a clue what's going on. Last I recall all the devices which have been blamed for aircraft instrumentation interference have been unable to reproduce the issue.
Speaking as someone who flies all the time for work, I've never been asked by a flight attendant to put away my paper book, or on the few times when I've had it out, my knitting, during takeoff OR landing. And this has been on flights where I have seen them getting on to people about electronic devices. The whole thing is a poorly enforced regulation that may have had a purpose in the early days of analog cell phones that put out a lot of interference and instruments that were possibly vulnerable to them, but these days it seems more than a bit out of date. And poorly enforced, I see people 'hiding' their cell phones all the time during takeoff and landing and just making sure they don't let the flight attendant see......
Free Pie! The Pie is Also Evil!
There's nothing special about the first 10 and last 10 minutes of a flight, other than it's the most likely time for a plane to crash land.
Actually, that's exactly what's special about those times.
Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
I fly all the time and have never once been asked to stow a book, including one I am actively reading.
Furthermore, they require the devices be OFF rather than simply stowed. If my phone is turned off and I can demonstrate it, they don't care if it's sitting in my hands and I'm playing with it, ineffectually pressing buttons and making wooshing sounds as I fly it around my immediate airspace. I say this from first-hand experience.
Which by process of elimination leaves...d) outdated paranoia?
Their may be a grammatical error, misspeling, or evn a typo in this post.
This is why on aircraft that are licensed to allow cell phone use carry their own femtocell style access points. There aren't many airlines/aircraft that are licensed, but the trials have been in place for some time.
The main problem with cell phones on planes is a customer problem: the cost. They charge at international roaming rates, so it's not worth it unless you're making money off the call.
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 +
Your airplane contained a microcell and wifi base station. This reduces the transmitter power concerns because the mobile unit is able to reduce power because it's close to the base station. It also resolves the problem of a phone being present in many ground cells at once, since the mobile unit instead connects to the aircraft-based cell.
The most popular provider of inflight wifi in the US is Gogo, which uses a ground-based network of CDMA transmitters to link the aircraft's wifi base station with the Internet.
End of Line.
-Shades up so other planes can see you better while you are on the ground at night
I haven't heard this reason before, and if you think about it, dedicated freighters don't have passenger windows at all for light to escape through.
One explanation that I have heard is that having the shades open provides better situational awareness during the critical landing and takeoff phases of fight. Suppose the port side engine catches fire. With the shades open, people will see this and the flight attendants will know to direct passengers to evacuate using the starboard side exits only.
End of Line.
If you'd ever flown you'd know that they ask you to stow all personal effects - books, bags, coats. So it's clearly not EM emissions they're worried about.
http://www.faa.gov/news/fact_sheets/news_story.cfm?newsid=6275
http://rgl.faa.gov/Regulatory_and_Guidance_Library/rgAdvisoryCircular.nsf/list/AC%2091.21-1A/$FILE/AC91-21-1A.pdf
4. BACKGROUND. Section 91.21 (formerly 91.19) was initially established in May 1961 to prohibit the operation of portable frequency-modulated radio receivers aboard U.S. air carrier and U.S.-registered aircraft when the very high frequency omnidirectional range was being used for navigation purposes. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) subsequently determined that other PED’s could be potentially hazardous to aircraft communication and navigation equipment, if operated aboard aircraft. Amendment 91-35 amended the scope of former section 91.19 to prohibit the use of additional PED’s aboard certain U.S. civil aircraft. Earlier studies conducted by RTCA, Inc. (RTCA), Special Committee 156, Document No. RTCA/DO-199, Volumes 1 and 2, entitled “Potential Interference to Aircraft Electronic Equipment from Devices Carried Aboard,” have contributed greatly to an understanding of the operational effects of PED’s aboard aircraft. (See paragraph 7b for obtaining copies.)
Which by a process of elimination leaves a) attention and b) clutter. And c), both.
I think you missed one:
d) because someone told them their job depends on them repeating that magic phrase.
I don't fly nearly as frequently as I used to, but I've [also] never been asked to put away a book I've been reading.
The "pay attention" notion seems reasonable - which is why it probably is not true. Instead the truth seems to be that they are enforcing a rule from the 60's that probably doesn't make much sense [any more].
Common sense and federal regulations, eh?
Cell phone do not interfere with airplane equipment. Totally different frequency bands. Cell phones are used on planes (surreptitiously) every day. Occasionally and angry stewardess, but no other ill effects.
Cell phones are not allowed on planes at the behest of the FCC, because the cell systems we use today were never designed for hand off calls over vast regions at the speed of a plane, and a phone at cruise altitude could light up a thousand towers. This prohibition was always an FCC issue, and never much of a concern for the FAA.
WIFI would be just as likely to interfere as would cellular radio.
Yet wifi on the planes is already available on many flights.
With wifi, you can do voip. Almost every Android phone has Voip (internet calling) built in.
As of this time, none of the airlines allowing WIFI let you use any Voice app. They claim bandwidth issues.
However voice does not take as much bandwidth as most people think.
I suspect there is still some security concerns with allowing voice communications that are the real hold up here, I doubt there are any real technological issues in providing the bandwidth. On the other hand they do allow text chat apps, as well as email.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
If your phone can connect to a tower 32,000’ away including all the scattering that buildings cause then there's no reason why it couldn't just because the signal is travelling in a more perpendicular direction with no obstacles.
Cellular antennas are optimized to receive signals in a horizontal "circle" parallel to the ground, so reception above/below a tower is poor.
If you're in the air, you're not connecting to a tower 32,000' below you, you're connecting to a whole bunch of towers 32,000' feet below you and 20+ miles away. Cellular signals will actually go pretty far with clear LOS, although the phone has to up the signal strength quite a bit, which is why a phone with a cellular antenna left on in-flight will burn a ton of battery.
paintball
There's nothing special about the first 10 and last 10 minutes of a flight, other than it's the most likely time for a plane to crash land.
Well, you must be right. The last ten minutes of a flight will always have the highest incidence of crashes, since every flight that crashes has a last ten minutes. Except those that crash in the first ten.
But you're wrong in that the first and last ten minutes are not special. The first and last ten minutes of a normal flight are when the aircraft passes through the same airspace where all the VFR and IFR general aviation aircraft are, and are in the viscinity of an active airport where air traffic tends to congregate for some unknown reason. Getting above 10,000' means you've left most of the small private fleet behind, and once you hit 18,000' you're into IFR-only O2-carrying airspace (Class A), and that limits the amount of traffic even more. In bad weather, at either end of the flight, they need to concentrate on flying prescribed flight path so they don't run into anyone else, or into a big rock or whatever other hazard they need to avoid.
So you are actually wrong, the first and last ten are critical times in the flight profile, not just for those planes that are headed for a crash. That's why there is something called "sterile cockpit rules", where flight crews are prohibited from random chatter during important phases of the flight (like takeoff and landing).
In between, the workload is lighter and the pilots have a bit of time to deal with problems that crop up without them being a serious danger just by being a distraction. There is a common saying about flying, that a flight is "ten minutes of panic punctuated by hours of bordom in between." Or something like that.
The regulation is all about causing passengers to pay attention to flight attendants and nothing to do with avionics.
You are absurdly incorrect. The flight attendants don't need to include any instructions about electronic devices in order to need your attention to the briefing, it is a FEDERAL LAW that they give you that briefing and that it covers certain material. Those briefings aren't going to go away if the FAA and FCC change the rules about being able to use your cellphone during flight.
I sat next to a relief pilot on a United flight from PHX to SFO. He talked on his cell phone from the moment we got on, until he lost his signal after takeoff. As soon as he got a signal again, he was talking all through the approach and landing. He still had it stuck to his ear as we walked off the plane. The cabin crew didn't say a word to him.
a phone at cruise altitude could light up a thousand towers.
so you are saying that if i leave my phone on, it can screw my devil worshiping service provider? duly noted sir!!
Actually, the receiver will generate very low level signals that propagate out from the device as part of the Rx circuits. This is no big deal - unless your GPS is in your pocket, you're in the window seat, and the plane's GPS receiver is mounted between the plastic interior skin and the outer aluminum skin (what, you thought the plane's GPS RF section was in the cockpit?). Your GPS receiver will be putting out a tiny signal, but it may still swamp the signal being received from the satellites 12,000 miles (20000 km) away.
For example, there was a report to the NASA pilot safety program:
"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). This is apocryphal, and even if true would likely be the result of a badly damaged or badly designed device that didn't meet FCC regulations - but if you're going to allow a million people to carry on any electronic device they might have, in whatever condition it might be in, you're going to run into these kinds of receive-only-devices-that-transmit-worrisome-amounts-of-unexpected_RF.
This (http://gpsinformation.net/airgps/gsm_intf1.pdf) discusses the likely interference caused by phones in an aircraft; the big worry isn't so much modern planes and electronics, as it is electronics and planes designed before 1984:
"From the above, by comparing the test results with the qualification levels given in Section 2, it
can be seen that interference levels produced by a portable telephone, used near the flight deck or
avionics equipment bay, will exceed demonstrated susceptibility levels for equipment qualified to
standards published prior to July 1984. Since equipment qualified to these standards are installed in older
aircraft, and can be installed (and is known to be installed) in newly built aircraft, current policy for
restricting the use of portable telephones on all aircraft will need to remain in force." Of course, this document is 12 years old now, discussing designs that were current 16 years previously.
And the worms ate into his brain.
Yes but you have to look at it from the point of view of the cabin crew. They can't take the time to evaluate every single piece of electronic equipment passengers want to use during the flight to make sure that none of them are transmitting. God, look how long it takes everyone just to stow their bags and sit their asses down in their seats. Now imagine the cabin crew having to check everyone's devices individually as well. The plane would never take off. So its easier to use the blanket statement of "No electronic devices during take off and landing". Honestly, is it really that fucking hard to not fiddle with your gps, or phone, or kindle, or tablet, or ipad, or whatever for a few minutes? Read the damn sky mall magazine for fuck's sake.
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.
This ban on wireless has always been a red herring. Mobile devices typically operate at a couple of watts, tops. Meanwhile, while taking off or landing, a plane is going to pass fairly close to many cell towers, each of which is belting out much more powerful, much more continuous signals.
And nothing happens.
Planes are also hit with radar from ATC, MET, TCAS, and more, plus massive signals from broadcast media. All the time.
And nothing happens.
Banning this stuff was partly out of what-if fears, and partly because it was an area where the agency and airlines could impose their control upon the public. They really and truly get off on being able to tell us to stand there, do this, don't do that, don't bring water, don't use your phone, don't use your GPS, don't use your laptop, and so on, with "it's against the law" as justification 1, "it's policy" as justification 2 and "We'll arrest you sucka!" as justification 3, and finally to sum up them all: "OMG the plane might crash!"
Sig for hire.
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.
e-reader with its strong construction that is made to not give is most likely going to cause the most amount of damage. and if it hits something and comes apart it there could be flying glass all over the place.
So, you've never seen a Kindle then.