And when, confirmed fact, has this ever happened due to a cell phone or other being turned on. No issues with the plane,it was all just the device
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Airline Industry Remains Divided Over Personal Electronics Usage During Takeoff and Landing
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And when, confirmed fact, has this ever happened due to a cell phone or other being turned on. No issues with the plane,it was all just the device
We already live in this world. Many people leave their devices on. There is no check of what sort of device people carry on the plane. On many flights (especially in business/first class) most of the passengers have headphones in at all stages of the flight.
...and if there was any evidence, the response should be to fix the problem rather than try and enforce an unenforceable rule.
Then stop insulting our intelligence and ask people to stow books, magazines, food, knitting, personal electronics etc. during landing for safety reasons. And try and keep the time to a minimum. Don't train people to ignore announcements by bombarding them with pointless tannoy messages every 30 seconds from the moment they walk into the airport. Maybe replace the pointless 'no smoking' lights with 'important announcement in progress' lights (pro tip: advertising duty free and reward schemes is not an important announcement). Works with deaf people, non-English speakers and compulsive talkers, too. You get more with a kind word, a big red light and a klaxon than you do with just a kind word.
Many airlines will ask you to stow anything the size of a laptop (electronic or not) during t&l (would be easier if they didn't pre-fill the seat pockets with magazines and catalogs) and some take all the blankets away.
Headphones are a potential problem - although on my last flight you were allowed to keep the airline-provided headphones on (OK so you should get the announcements over those - won't stop you garrotting yourself when you try and exit in a hurry though).
Personally, I can live without a laptop or headphones for 10 minutes each end of a flight - the main issue is the new-ish ones of e-readers. I rely on a good book (or even a bad book) to keep me sane during the endless tedium of air travel - especially when the "10 minutes" stretches to half an hour or more of faffing around. Anyway, I'm not sure how you turn a Kindle off other than letting the battery go flat...
JFK a few times only. I guess I don't remember it being that long. When I go to Chicago, I always fly into Midway. With that being said, my home airport is LAX, so it's just as busy as any other larger airport. Yes, sometimes stuff happens and you get stuck on the runway, but it's not all the time.
Not only do I want cell phone/electronics off during takeoff/landing, I don't want free wifi on board. I can imagine all of the self absorbed d-bags making facetime/skype/etc. calls annoying the crap out upstanding decent people who's parents taught them how to respect others.
Happily.
The transceivers within the devices, especially the cellular radio, are relatively strong sources of RF - by design. While they operate on different frequencies than aircraft electronics (VHF nav, for example), their operation can induce a signal into aircraft systems. It's not terribly different than how you can hear a nearby AM radio station on a guitar amplifier, telephone, etc..
I would theorize that the CDI interference I observed to be caused by a cell phone in the cockpit was not actually interfering with the nav radio but rather the signal between the nav receiver and the CDI itself. Purely theory, since I didn't have a scope in the cockpit to plug it and observe the noise on the line. However, the interference went away when the phone was switched off and returned when the phone was turned back on.
Consider also that many aircraft systems have no corollary in automobiles, trains, etc. as has been mentioned earlier in this topic. Placement of antennas on aircraft is an engineered solution, not a "this looks nice here", to avoid interference not only with each other but with other sensors such as magnetometer/flux detectors, AHRS boxes, and so on. Placing a transmitter in close proximity to a magnetometer will affect it.
Finally, consider that many airliners flying today are more than a few years old and were designed at a time when passengers carried lots of RF emitters on their persons. I'd be surprised if a 787 had any issues, for example, but an MD-88 might.
Bottom line - none of this is proof, but there are enough known interference modes that I believe further investigation is necessary and until there is sufficient evidence that no issues exist I'd prefer to err on the side of caution for myself and my passengers.
What more can research carried out by a few people over a small sample size tell us that the data already amassed can't? There are tens of millions of flights every year. Over the last 20 years, that adds up to hundreds of millions of commercial flights with personal electronics on board with no accidents. What more do you want?
When a plane is designed and manufactured it is required to go through an array of controlled testing by a few people over a small sample size before it is allowed to carry passengers. Would you feel it better to allow manufacturers to just start rolling them straight out without that testing and "prove" that they're safe by putting millions of people on them?
Every incidence of anecdotal evidence that electronics may cause interference is exactly that: Anecdotal. However, since nobody truly knows the numbers of devices, types of devices, mix of those types and accompanying conditions when people leave their electronics on, every time a plane navigates safely in that situation it's also anecdotal.
A series of controlled scientific studies could be conducted that would provide a much higher degree of certainty regarding the potential risks of using electronic devices. Until that is done, and since until then all we have is anecdotal evidence, the ban should remain in effect, and be enforced.
Less confused now?
Books have the same exact effect and are heavier/thicker than laptops/tablets, making them a bigger hazard. That's not a valid reason to ban their use.
There are two different needs here. I don't care about keeping devices in Airplane mode and not texting/making calls while flying. Personally I just want to be able to start reading books on my iPad or Kindle while waiting for the plane to take off/land. I look around and see some people with physical books and they can distract themselves immediately while I have to wait 20-30 min before I can start. It's mildly annoying.
Put a cell phone next to a magnetomer. Observe magnetometer output. Turn cell phone on and place a call. Observe magnetometer output and compare with first reading.
And actually, I have installed avionics systems and designed shielding for such...
it just seems like an entitlement society, I really dont understand the issue with keeping them off/put away for the short period during take off.
The article specifically says the compass went haywire, leading the pilot to steer the plane off course:
Given that regional airlines typically hire green pilots who don't have enough hours in the cockpit to work for the big airlines, it could also be the case that this pilot navigated poorly and was simply covering his arse. Otherwise, we would see smartphones and tablets affecting airline compass readings on a daily basis.
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macrumors 65816
I have no problem with having my gear switched off for take off and landing.
These days, some aircraft allow full cellular service and WiFi in the air. I recently tried the service on an Emirates A-380 while flying from Manchester to Dubai - more than adequate for a little light surfing, facebooking, email and Skype instant messaging. I'd certainly like to see this on more aircraft (well, the WiFi - I like the fact that people don't make loud phone calls when flying).
These days, some aircraft allow full cellular service and WiFi in the air. I recently tried the service on an Emirates A-380 while flying from Manchester to Dubai - more than adequate for a little light surfing, facebooking, email and Skype instant messaging. I'd certainly like to see this on more aircraft (well, the WiFi - I like the fact that people don't make loud phone calls when flying
).
No we don't. Your premise is that he anecdotal evidence of the lack of effect is proof, which it is not. Negates the rest of your argument.
Although, the bizarre thing about the FAA policy is that they don't want you to have your electronics on from pushback to takeoff, but it's ok to turn them on as soon as you land and are taxiing to the gate. As if the instruments function differently whether the plane is taxiing out for takeoff or taxiing in after landing.
Also, if your plane happens to get put in the "penalty box" yards away from the active runway -- which often happens if your destination airport initiates a Ground Stop for a period of time -- the pilot will almost always tell the passengers it's ok to use their phones while they're waiting to takeoff. So you then have dozens of people making and receiving phone calls, text messages, and using cellular data just yards away from an active runway. There are so many holes in the logic of the FAA's current policy on electronics that it's laughable.
You'd be surprised how many planes take off every day with a couple handsets still on.
I'm not confused at all. I just don't have the infinite faith in research that you and many other here do. I do research myself all the time as part of my job. Therefore I see how big the limitations are to the necessarily small sample size that any research project must use are. You can do the research to give you a baseline - and this is effectively what happened 25 years ago or whenever when the industry adopted the current standards - they had some basic research to go on - but until it was really tested day in and day out under all scenarios with huge sample sizes, nobody really knew what would happen. Today, 25 years later, we have that sample size to work with, and we now know that the rules initially suggested are too strict. Consumer electronics don't crash airplanes. To insist on 'more research' is folly; the data is sound, and research can only ever answer a small part of the question.
And to think that United flight 232 passenger Pete Traeger, unaware the plane was cartwheeling down the runway in Sioux City, could have survived had he not been wearing those danged headphones.
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I have never heard the crew announcing that all but first class passengers should turn off their devices. The first class might be listening to the music provided by the crew. Regardless, you do not want to make the situation worse than it already is.
I fly out of Newark every week, and it takes a lot longer than 15 mins from when they shut the door to when the aircraft is at 10,000 feet. I can see an hour or more very easily.
But the thick headed would argue even if you repeated these steps 20 times and had the same results, that it could have been from the bubble gum wrapper in your back pocket causing this as you shift your body weight while pressing the power button on your phone.
Who said that people would limit themselves by consumer electronics only? The distinction is not that clear in a first place.
It doesn't in any way.
We know why basically every major crash that has ever happened has occurred. None of them have been attributed to consumer electronics. If this were 1989 and portable electronics were new and we didn't really know how they were going to effect things, then yes, I'd support research to find out, and reasonable precautions until then. But now, 25 years later, we know. No research project can ever give us better data than that we already have. At some point you have to move out of the lab and look at what's happening in the real world.
since this seems common in some areas, it's an air traffic problem rather than a policy problem.