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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.
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.
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 The rules for turning the devices off have no basis in reality and are as outdated as the manual typewriter.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.
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
Permit wifi and crack down on screaming children.
We all hate screaming children, especially those of us who fly with them.
What we hate even more are clueless assholes who don't have children telling us what rotten people we are because our three year old lost patience during the last hour of a 6 hour flight delayed two hours.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.