I see the same questions and comments over and over again, from people are obviously neither pilots nor engineers. Let's review some:
But my radio / device is in receive only mode.
ALL digital electronics are transmitters. CPUs require oscillators at MHZ to GHz frequencies. Those are transmitters. Even receive only simple transistor radios have oscillators that transmit.
I don't understand why pilots can use iPads but I can't.
The use of those two iPads in the cockpit has taken most airlines over a year to test and get approved. There is no way that those results carry over to dozens of other people using electronics.
How can electronics so far from the cockpit interfere?
The radio antennas, anti-collision antennas, their wires, and all the modern electronic control wires run through the cabin. You can easily be just a few feet away from one of those. There are cases where pilots have gotten emergency automatic climb/descend commands that likely came from passenger electronics in a seat nearby one of those cables.
Why aren't they worried about outside interference as much?
An airplane is what's called a Faraday Cage, because it's a closed metal tube (or a composite with embedded metal for lightening protection). This prevents outside signals from entering the cabin (except through the windows). It also tends to keep the signals that originate inside, inside and bouncing around.
But interference can't bring down a plane, so why should I worry?
Text messages don't stop a car's engine from working, yet they have caused many wrecks and deaths.
Interference, as in disabling something, is usually not the problem. The problem is causing distractions to the pilots or interference to instruments. Safe flight, especially when in the airport area for landing or takeoff, is highly dependent on good communications and no distractions. Non-pilots don't realize that it takes very little to cause an aviation accident, especially when low and slow and in a crowded airspace. All it needs is a chain of little mistakes.
If it's dangerous, why do they allow usage above 10,000 feet?
10,000 feet is also where speed limits change, radio comm rules change, separation distances change, all sorts of things change.
This is because the more altitude you have, the more time that pilots have to debug a problem.
But some airliners have WiFi
Above 10,000 feet. They also use low power, and expect the passenger devices to likewise use low power. See below.
Got an example of an interference?
I have previously posted quite a few examples from the NASA database. GSM buzz, false anti-collision alarms, navigation instrument wonkiness, and autopilot shut-offs are the main ones.
Handled high up, they're not so bad. Within the airport environment, they're a potential accident chain cause.
Here's a good example: Recently, Boeing engineers were certifying one of their airliner models for WiFi. Quite by accident, they found that some laptops ramped up their WiFi power, causing the plane's WiFi to ramp up, and the interference caused the pilots LCD displays to go blank. (!) They fixed it by adding more display shielding, but ...
Consider if that had happened while landing at night or in clouds. It's been proven many times that without working instruments in dark or sightless conditions, a pilot's (and by extension, the passengers') life expectency is measured in minutes. (There was a 747 that crashed on takeoff at night, because of faulty reading instruments. The pilot accidentally rolled it upside down into the sea.)
Would you risk your familiy, or your child's life, just to use your iPad a few minutes more?
I think, until everything on an airliner is shielded and all signals sent by fiber optics, that this is a mistake.
