F.A.A. Panel Backs Easing of Device Rules
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
…I urge the agency to embrace the expanded use of PEDs…
…the public is growing increasingly skeptical of prohibitions on the use of many electronic devices…
…such anachronistic policies undermine the public's confidence in the FAA…
…absurdity of the current situation…
…It is my hope that the FAA will work, with the FCC and other federal agencies where appropriate, as expeditiously as possible to implement common sense changes…
…I am prepared to pursue legislative solutions should progress be made too slowly.
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¹ http://www.mccaskill.senate.gov/?p=press_release&id=1757
Contemporaneous HN posting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4914344
Things like this breed distrust in the government. If they had reacted in a couple of years after wifi became prevalent you could easily argue the "we need more testing" angle and people would buy it. But after 10+ years there's no good excuse.
What other stuff is happening right now that the government says is "unsafe" (and thus banned) which is actually safe, and what is "safe" (and thus not banned) which is not?
The only way for a government to have a believable claim to legitimacy is to work ruthlessly to minimize false positives and false negatives and if/when they happen to root out the source of the problem and ensure it'll never happen again. Sadly we rarely see much or any of this.
There is a reasonable line here. In a year 90% of us will think the current one was idiotic. Seriously - I can't read a kindle on takeoff/landing?
Don't get me wrong - I'm all for eliminating risk - but it would have taken very little effort to add WiFi/Eletronic transmitter detectors to planes - the fact that they didn't, means that it was never a real risk.
No. No no no no.
Logic like this is often used by the government to justify the existence of things like the TSA. "We need to be overconservative to prevent terrorist attacks." Except it doesn't work when the measures are of questionable benefit whereas the costs are astronomical.
Airline travel used to be pretty dangerous. Today, in the US, it's about as safe as any human endeavor has ever been. The danger is close enough to zero that the delta cannot be properly measured. Even in the past decade or so, airline travel has become much safer.
This particular policy was almost certainly not useful. But the overall regime of "better safe than sorry" has proven to be highly effective in this particular context.
The context here is this particular policy, not FAA's approach to airline travel as a whole.
The TSA, on the other hand, is all about interacting with the public to try and make us feel safer about travel in general. Generally, interacting with the public is rarely a strong point for any government agency.
Sure, it's a bad policy. But it's a bad policy that came out of an overall approach that has proven to be superb. To think that this one failure is an indication of anything is absurd. You can't expect perfection.
With regard to safety rules - there are usually two issues at hand, neither of which have anything to do with safety (particularly your safety).
On the one hand, you have people who believe it is always better to err on the side of safety - whether that means you taking your shoes off every time you board a plane, patting down/scanning every single passenger, or saying you can't read a kindle during takeoff - there is ZERO cost to the person requiring that rule, and even an infinitesimal risk (say, 1 in a billion) means that there is real cost to the individual/group saying we can forego those precautions.
Because the inconvenience/costs of the "Safety Rules" are born by others, but the potential (no matter how small) cost of not having that rule is borne by the individual who said it was no longer needed - the default position will ALWAYS be to add more safety rules.
Pushing the other direction is $$$. Anytime people with $$$ are involved, all sorts of safety rules are dropped. There wasn't a big kindle/laptop lobby pushing for the dropping of the NoElectronics rule, which is why it lasted so long.
However, I think that "breed distrust in the government" quip is completely asinine. The FAA's airline policies overall have resulted in an industry where you can buy a ticket across the country for just a few hundred dollars, while simultaneously being so safe that it has become literally impossible to measure the danger of flying on an airliner in the US, because incidents don't happen frequently enough for there to be enough data.
The electronic devices policy is/was a tiny little wart on an unbelievably successful regulatory environment. To act like this somehow destroys trust in government is insane. You're basically expecting perfection and rejecting a massive success as being terrible just because there's an extremely minor problem buried within.
The problem is that it's something very public and that everyone already knows it doesn't cause problems. There are all kinds of electronic devices which don't have an "off" button. Do they somehow magically not create EM interference? Tons of people have been ignoring the rules for years and it's taken years and years for the FAA to say "well you know maybe it's OK"
The problem there is that there are all kinds of nutjobs out there who use this kind of thing to promote their own crazy theories. And because the timeline to go from most people understanding empirically that electronics don't crash planes to the FAA admitting it was so long, it lends credence to the idea that any rule could be bullshit. If it takes 10 years to find out that something was overly cautious, who's to say it might not take 20 or 30 for something else? Those arguments can be very persuasive to people already inclined to be skeptical.
For the average person, stuff like this does very little to undermine anything.
http://www.boeing.com/commercial/aeromagazine/aero_10/interf...
There is no law in the UK requiring airports to provide free potable water to the public, so at around $3 per bottle this is an extremely lucrative consequence of security regulations.
Compared to that revenue, selling magazine is old hat!
* I am always delighted at the provision of water fountains in US airports. O'Hare even has ones specifically designed for filling bottles!
Nowadays you have Air/ultrabooks, iPads with 10hr batteries, and Kindles so one never need actually resort to dead-tree.
"Um, no. Did you SEE that episode of myth busters?"
"Oh. Well.. um.. the real reason is so you pay attention".
You can't just change the reason because your original reason has been proven wrong. If this was the real reason, then they should have been upfront about it.
But like a sibling commenter states - reading a book (as opposed to a kindle), or being deaf (as opposed to wearing earphones - this one's probably a bad comparison..) carry the same 'risks' and neither are banned.
Let's see how that goes over when 50+ people in a small space start yammering.