I’ve long squawked about how ridiculous the airline “safety” rules and procedures are.
Sully recently embarrassed me with his water landing, but at least the data on the danger of electronic devices is coming down on my side.
According to TechDirt, a European provider of in-flight cellphone calls has logged 10,000 calls without incident: no crashes, no interference with planes’ electronics, and no impact on ground networks.
So far there are no statistics, however, on how many thousands of other travelers wanted to kill the people jabbering on their cell phones on the planes.
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How about in hospitals or doctor’s offices? In both of these situations you don’t want to be wrong, and I’m not sure I want people to use their phones in either place, but I’ve wondered if the ban is based on data or paranoia.
Its not an FAA regulation. Its an FCC regulation. Note how they never tell you the reason why you must turn off your cell phones or other electronic equipment.
Yes, but there are 13,000,000 flights per year in the US. What if there is only a 1 in 10,000,000 chance of an incident? Is it worth having 200 deaths per year so people can make inflight calls?
If I make a cell call, no, I have a better shot at winning the lottery (not going to happen) than to endanger the flight. But someone, somewhere wins the lottery every week.
If there’s no feasible way that a phone is going to bring down a plane–then undo that regulation. If there is even a remote chance, keep it.
The specific requirement which bans the use of cellphones on US aircraft is *not* an FAA regulation — it is an FCC regulation. The FCC does not want people using cellphones at altitude in an aircraft because it can tie up multiple cell phone nodes and slow down the system. It has nothing to do with impairing aircraft systems. That said, there *are* FAA requirements about the use of electronic devices onboard — though it is primarily up to the aircraft operator to determine which devices are included.
I can think of a couple of problems here:
1) I think that making people put phones etc away is so that they are paying attention during landing in case a quick evac is needed.
2) Cell phone talking on the plane would be annoying
3) In Japan it is highly rude, and prohibited by signs to talk on the trains
4) Cell phone users in Japan therefore are expert at text messaging
Perhaps text messaging on planes could become the norm…
Slate recently had a good article on this, http://www.slate.com/id/2215050/. Basically there is an overlap between the frequency the cellphone uses and the frequency the navigation system uses. Although the chances of anything happening is small, “continued use of portable RF-emitting devices such as cell phones will, in all likelihood, someday cause an accident by interfering with critical cockpit instruments such as GPS receivers.”
Is this an acceptable risk?
It was on mythbusters, they deemed it busted, but as Michael says, they choose to err on the safe side in this scenario:
“It was found that cell phone signals, specifically those in the 800-900 MHz range, did intefere with unshielded cockpit instrumentation. Because older aircraft with unshielded wiring can be affected, and because of the possible problems that may arise by having many airborne cell phones “seeing” multiple cell phone towers, the FCC (via enforcement through the FAA) still deems it best to err on the safe side and prohibit the use of cell phones while airborne”
http://mythbustersresults.com/episode49
MythBusters disagrees…it depends on the type of plane and cell phone signal. Since most people don’t know the type of phone they have or they type of equipment on the plane…in this case people can live without their phones for a few hours.
http://mythbustersresults.com/episode49