How many flights take off or land with all passengers and crew members in full compliance with the current rules? Close to none.
Say commercial planes have 60 passengers/crew member in average. 5 don't have any devices (small kids). Of the 55 passengers that have one or more devices, maybe 30 turn off their devices as they are told, 15 put them on airplane mode and 10 don't give a shit or just forget it.
If there are 20 million flights per year there have been some 400 million flights in the 20 years where cell phones have been common. 400 million flights of which 99 percent have flown with some passengers' phones turned on. Has there ever been a single flight accident due to cell phones? Just one?
As newer airplanes are better shielded and old ones are taken out of service, the number of reported incidents have dropped in recent years down to 1-2 per year, which isn't much given the massive increase in PEDs and number of flights.
For the same reason the above message cites as reasons to think the rules were always bunk, the "reported incidents" are also likely to be bunk. It is very unlikely that any one passenger's electronics are the only electronics left on, and therefore very unlikely that the guy who gets berated for leaving his iPod on is causing any problems.
So you think that all the reports dating back to the 60s when superhet transistor radios appered, are likely bunk?
Wouldn't that imply a worldwide, secret pilot conspiracy, especially with incidents where the pilot has been able to reproduce the interference by asking the passengers to turn the device back on?
It's certainly very unlikely that an iPod will cause any problems. That doesn't mean it's physically impossible, as many people seem to think. Which is why I recommend reading the FAA report, which goes into a lot of detail on exactly what considerations they've taken, the risk analysis and why they are changing the rules now.
Some people believe anything from a government agency is wrong and that there aren't smart, capable people doing their jobs on the other end. Of all the things with air travel to pitch a hissy fit over, this one has always comes across as the silliest to me. Things really are going down the tubes if you can't be bothered to not look at your piece of glass for a minutes.
> Things really are going down the tubes if you can't be bothered to not look at your piece of glass for a minutes.
Every time this comes up, somebody's got to get snooty about Kids These Days and Their Attention Spans and Facebooks and Pokeymans.
All I really want to do is read a book during takeoff and landing. Reading is still a thing mature, responsible people do, right? Thanks to ever-decreasing passenger and storage space, it can be a genuine pain to fit even a mid-size paperback into my carry-on luggage in such a way that it's easily accessible during flight, especially for big, tall folks like me. It's much easier all around if I can read a book on my phone, which I have to have with me anyway; or, for some people, a slim tablet or e-reader is an easier fit.
But no, I can't do that (yet). I have to either cram a book in there somewhere, or spend 20+ minutes with nothing to distract me from the heat and the cramps and the screaming babies but vapid seat-back magazines. I know it's not the end of the world, but it's one more frustration piled on top of an already deeply frustrating and dehumanizing experience. After paying hundreds of dollars for the privilege of getting treated like a criminal suspect and then packed into a can like a sardine, it's not unreasonable to keenly desire a little bit of comfort and distraction, is it?
I agree with you, and I hope that lighter devices like ebooks and phones will be exempted eventually. Personally I always opt for a window seat and spend all that time looking outside enjoying the view of other airplanes. So in short, I'd recommend becoming an aviation geek, that will do a lot to distract you from all those annoyances. :)
Usually people say "minutes" when they are talking about time intervals of several minutes. The period you cannot use electronics is from the time the cabin door closes to the moment the plane reaches some arbitrary height on take off and the reverse sequence on landing. This can easily be anywhere from half an hour to several hours e.g. if the flight is delayed it will just stand at the gate with the closed door waiting for clear. You cannot use any electronics during that time.
You are responding in the context of a rather simple, factual argument ("How bad can these devices be since common sense shows they're already on during takeoff anyhow?") with first a political attack, then an emotional attack. Was this really a helpful post?
I've never switched off my devices during take-off or landing because if it actually risked any damage then they'd be screening people before they board.
That would have made a pretty funny punchline to a sketch. Suspicious looking guy (better band of suspicious looking guys) getting the full TSA workup/cavity search etc. Finally gets on board, everyone watching him suspiciously etc. Some sort of minor tussle with obvious plain clothes security who's reseated next to him by a concerned stewardess. Etc. When it's time to take of he fakes turning on airplane mode/powering down when placing it into the seat pocket. He smirks knowingly, closes his eyes and dreams about his field of virgins.
That's a very weird view of things. Do you really think this rule exists without a reason? Why not just follow the rules and turn your devices off, it's not going to hurt you, but a crash could.
Some might find, on the other hand, that it is a very weird view to not question rules before obeying them. For many readers here, there has no doubt been some awareness of the questions surrounding these flight rules, since this sort of topic (it's about our gizmos!) is going to be front-and-centre for many of us.
My understanding was that it hasn't to do with phones being turned on per se, but rather one's attention at the moment the flight is the riskiest: at take off and landing.
The rationale was that when you're playing on your device, you're paying less attention to the crew and what's around you, which can be problematic in case something bad happens and you need to react.
Well, I always heard that the problem was rapid handoffs between towers causing a lot of extra load on both the cell network and the phone itself. I can tell you anecdotally that on a few of occasions I haven't put my phone in airplane mode during a flight, and it seems to drain the battery muck more quickly than normal.
My understanding is that the problem isn't with the speed of the handovers, but rather with the fact that the horizon is a major block to radio signals, and the horizon is much farther away when you're at altitude.
Older networks were designed around the fairly reasonable assumption that a cell phone would only ever be able to talk to adjacent cells, because anything farther away would be over the horizon. So you might be able to talk to both A and B at the same time, but you couldn't talk to C without first losing contact with A.
Raise the phone a few thousand feet in the air and this assumption goes out the window, confusing the network. There's an amusing story of a pilot who called up his family to let them know he was almost home and ended up getting billed for the call (at expensive 80s rates) a bunch of times because several different towers all thought they were running the call.
> Older networks were designed around the fairly reasonable assumption that a cell phone would only ever be able to talk to adjacent cells, because anything farther away would be over the horizon
That can't possibly be true. Spectrum re-use in distant sites could in theory have some effect on the call but differences in signal strength would make significant effects unlikely.
Also, that story about the pilot must also be apocryphal. A handover is a handover, and there is only one "winning" decision. Not to mention that CDRs don't work that way.
Lots of civil aviation pilots use mobile devices in the air without problems for the user or network.
You may be right about the story, but I don't really see the obstacle to it happening. If you initiate a call in the air, you could easily not be able to communicate with the cell directly below (since they don't radiate much signal upwards) while being able to talk to two that are adjacent to it. Since those two cells would never have a reason to communicate in normal operations, confusion ensues.
I know that lots of pilots use mobile devices now, but we're talking ~30 years ago.
I quite often get early morning flights (e.g. I got a 05:50 on Monday) - usually by the time the flight takes off I am already sleeping. Nobody has every tried to wake me up so that I pay attention to take off or landing.
this seems valid to me - they put just as much emphasis on ensuring your window shade is up (for post-crash hazard identification) to electronics being switched off.
It's likely due to attentiveness should you need to evac
AFAICT, they tell you to put the window shade up during landing in order to wake people up and thus to get out of the seat and off the plane as soon as possible. I've never had them ask to open window shades at night (possibly because they're not closed).
Yep, if you read the FAA position, that's the idea. The risk wasn't seen as huge, but since there was a possibility of interference the trade-off seemed reasonable. Just one of the many small things done to improve safety.
I was recently on a transatlantic flight during which our Boeing 767's right jet engine caught fire and blew out. It was a terrible experience and I can assure you that at least for the first 5-10 minutes nobody on the plane was buried in their books or personal electronics. Everyone was suppressing panic and desperately paying attention to whatever shreds of information we could get from the flight attendants. The whole excuse about wanting people to pay attention during an emergency is total crap. Once your body kicks into survival mode the last thing on your mind is your phone.
Holy crap. That's terrifying - where were you when it blew out? How did the staff (pilots and stewards/stewardesses) behave - I've always wondered how well anyone, no matter how much they were trained, would cope in a real [potential] emergency on an aircraft?
Many years ago, I was on a 747 when an engine blew out (by which I mean a column of flame came out of the engine--no exterior physical damage). As I recall, they didn't say anything about a problem at first but the plane diverted to the nearest airport which happened to be Kuwait; this was long before the Gulf War etc. 747's have four engines though so this was possibly a less serious problem than on a two engine plane.
Part of the reason we don't have as many 3 and 4 engine airliners anymore is ETOPS[1]. Modern turbine engines are so reliable, powerful, and efficient that there's not as significant of a need for the additional redundancy provided by a third or fourth engine.
Two engine planes don't have problems flying on 1 engine. Adding an engine is the best safety feature the plane can have. Multi-engine pilots often joke that you pay for both engines when you train, but you only use one, since during training, the instructors constantly shut one down. By that point, you've already got at least a single engine land certificate, so the only thing they're training you for is that when an engine cuts out, instead of gliding to the nearest field/strip, you fly there a little crooked under power.
There are lots of problems flying two-engined planes on one engine. Asymmetric thrust makes flying the plane tricky. Significantly reduced thrust greatly reduces performance. Managing the engines becomes more complex since you might not treat them the same anymore (especially if one is on fire).
In small multi-engine planes where single-engine flight is marginal, the safety advantage is terribly clear. You have a better chance if an engine fails, but you also have a lot more failures.
It's less of a problem in large airliners, where the margins are higher and the training more thorough. The safety advantage is clear enough that all large airliners have at least two engines. Still, there are accidents that stem from a single failed engine on a multi-engine airliner:
That last one is not technically an airliner, but it's the same basic category, and I think it's a particularly interesting example as they had four engines, but managed to screw things up badly enough after losing just one to crash anyway.
I can't find the quote, but it was from a pilot of one of the first commercial 2 engined airliner jets, 737 or 777 I forget.
Basically the reporter said, are you more worried if you lose one engine of two versus one engine of four on the 747/707/etc. To which the pilot replied, losing an engine is always a serious problem. Maybe if we ever get to my copilot saying we've lost engine 43 will it be a non issue.
More engines just means more chances for failure. All I know is losing any engine isn't something you treat lightly.
A military pilot called for a priority landing because his single-engine jet fighter was running "a bit peaked." Air Traffic Control told the fighter pilot that he was number two, behind a B-52 that had one engine shut down. "Ah," the fighter pilot remarked, "The dreaded seven-engine approach."
We were about an hour away from the nearest airport in Ireland. The staff reacted pretty poorly IMO... no information given whatsoever for the first few minutes. Everyone was freaking out. If you're interested full story is here: http://obiefernandez.com/writing/2013/8/10/engine-failure
Maybe - but I still has this photo of me leaving the office building during a fire holding my PC's harddrive. The whole workstation was too heavy sadly.
Yes they were. Flight attendants consistently ask people to put away their Kindles and iPads.
Of course they didn't and couldn't check if the devices are completely switched off (or even in flight safe mode), but they very much keep people from using them.
Flying mostly from/to the UK, that's not exactly what I saw. Most of the time people will put the device on their lap with the screen turned off and get back to using it as soon as the flight attendants are in their seats. Pretty much the same thing with "please leave your seatbelts fastened until the engines are off" (with click, click, click all around).
I observe the click-click-clickers too and believe they are monumental idiots that not only endanger themselves, but other passengers as well. And all this for no good reason at all.
Watch the video, taken by an amateur in JFK, of an AirFrance A380 touching a smaller plane and spinning it around and imagine you where sitting in the small plane not buckled up:
The reason why this behavior mystifies me so much is that by jumping out of your seat prematurely you will be leaving the plane exactly 0 seconds earlier as when you remain buckled up until the plane is safely parked at the gate.
Not to mention turbulence, which can pick you up, bang your stupid head on the luggage bin so that it cracks and then throw you back in a seat. This seat might not even be yours and you injure other people with your stupidity. See
I never understood the stander-uppers either... until I got caught behind someone who took 10 minutes to get their overstuffed luggage out of the overhead locker. That's an annoying wait. These days it's a crapshoot - if I have people waiting for me, I'll be a stander-upper. Otherwise I'll sit until it's clear.
Well, I can't speak to your personal experience, but the "click-click-clicking" is in my experience a perfect example that most people try to do what the flight attendants tell them to.
As soon as the plane lands, there is a tricke of clicks until the plane is parked. And when the "fasten your seatbelts"-sign is switched off, the rest of the passengers go "click". From my experience, this sounds like most of the passengers.
(My experience is mostly from Norway and Europe in general)
That's the purpose of those rules: To give flight attendants a plausible safety-related task. That takes the passengers' minds off the fact that airliner safety rituals for passengers are absurd and that other aspects of in-flight service are sub-par.
Sure, they may be absurd, but the safety record of commercial air transport is absurd as well. (If you don't want or appreciate that safety level, light, ultralight or experimental aircraft are good options that allow for different risk tradeoffs).
For sure. I was once asked to remove my headphones even though they were visibly not plugged in to anything (I wanted to block out the noise from takeoff).
I have been doing this for years on my gameboy/sega/iphone/ipad/mac. I even turned my airplane mode off to see how long it would take to loose service last time I flew. (I dont fly very often)
I had a similar experience, small plane over a relatively hilly area in Zambia. It took me a bit to get past the assumption that the vibrating around my leg wasn't a structural problem with plane....
I saw a passenger next to me texting at 37k feet over Kansas on an JFK-SFO flight once. It was SMS, not iMessage (the message bubbles were green). How did he get signal up there?
He's probably got better signal there than I do down here on the ground. Cell towers have a range of about 5km at the absolute minimum, and a whole lot more than that if there's no hills in the way (e.g., if the phone is directly above them).
Actually directional antennas make no difference in regard to their allowed transmission power. The allowed power is specified as EIRP (Equivalent isotropically radiated power), which specifies the power a perfectly isotropic antenna emits. So if you increase the gain of your antenna, you have to decrease the amount of power you feed into your antenna to stay inside legal bounds (assuming of course you were at the maximum allowed transmission power to begin with).
What you do gain however is gain on the receive path (so you can hear the mobile phones better). Also the possibility to build segments and thus increase the usage of your frequency bands.
Yes, in densely populated areas with high frequencies (3G/LTE). In more rural areas the antennas cover a bigger area. My experience in light aircraft (operating below 10000 feet) is that 2G GSM connectivity is pretty good, 3G not so much.
In my limited experience (not on an airliner, so actually legalish), signal is usually good below 4,000ft, almost guaranteed to be gone above 6,000ft, and hit or miss in between.
I've always wondered why they had this rule in the first place. Each wireless device by FCC rules (or equivalent dept in each country) must operate withing a designated RF frequency range.
One would think that pilots would use a frequency range that would be in the private (not public like Wifi 2.4/5.x Gh) range and thus never be overlapped.
Flying is serious business. You don't want to take any risks having your metal box carrying a few hundred people fall down. You really do not.
Aircrafts are also pretty complex, and the parts, electronics, engines, wires and so on are undergoing heavy testing and verification before you use that part to build an aircraft. This is quite unlike consumer devices such as mobile phones, which just have to pass the minimum government tests to be sold to common people.
As there's numerous different mobile phones, with all sorts of radios in them, it's too hard to test/verify that none of them interfers with any of the electronics your airplane has. (I'm sure you've heard the recognizable sounds in a nearby speaker on an incoming call/SMS on a GSM phone - these devices really do influence other electronic.)
The easy solution is to just ban them, and require them to be turned off, because even if the chance is ever so small, you don't want to risk your plane full of people to fall down.
Once that policy was in place, many many years ago, it takes a lot of inertia to change. No executive wants to be the one making the decision and a few days later learn that something quite bad happened.
Add in the bonus of not having passengers be annoyed at the neighbour chatting away at the phone, and the passengers being more attentive during takeoff/landing.
RF testing requirements and efforts vary from country to country, and even with certified devices there might be manufacturing defects that could cause interference. So it's impossible to be 100% certain.
The rules were there as a "better safe than sorry" measure, implemented at a time when most people didn't carry many electronic devices (way before cell phones became popular). The pilots have training to fly with multiple instrument failures, but even so you want to do what you can to reduce the risk of that happening.
RF interference can occur in a wide area of the spectrum, so it's not really possible to eliminate it just by changing frequencies. Even if you could, getting the aviation community to change their frequencies which are used all over the world in all airplanes and at all airports would be exceptionally expensive.
I just got home from my first trip since the FAA changed their rules, and it was really quite refreshing not to be able to continue using [non-radio] devices. Among other things, I think it generally calms the passengers and makes them less unruly.
Such a bunk rule anyways. If there was the remotest chance of a phone / kindle / whatever interfering with in-flight systems, bringing any electronics onboard would be expressly forbidden. They'd take them away from you at the security screening (like they do with the extremely dangerous water bottles and nail clippers these days..)
Say commercial planes have 60 passengers/crew member in average. 5 don't have any devices (small kids). Of the 55 passengers that have one or more devices, maybe 30 turn off their devices as they are told, 15 put them on airplane mode and 10 don't give a shit or just forget it.
If there are 20 million flights per year there have been some 400 million flights in the 20 years where cell phones have been common. 400 million flights of which 99 percent have flown with some passengers' phones turned on. Has there ever been a single flight accident due to cell phones? Just one?