Europe approves use of in-flight electronics during take-off and landing
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
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.
The report that the FAA published actually has a lot of interesting info about this: http://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/ped/media/ped_arc_final...
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.
No, it would only require similar delusions. That happens all the time.
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?
Yes, which is why we're getting rid of it now.
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.
EDIT: I'm just the messenger, guys ;)
Conveniently forgetting that they have a live update of your exact position from NORAD/FAA/etc...
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.
There's certainly no problem today, anyway.
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.
I know that lots of pilots use mobile devices now, but we're talking ~30 years ago.
It's likely due to attentiveness should you need to evac
Which is perfectly fine with me.
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."
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:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kegworth_air_disaster
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_191
http://www.delawareonline.com/article/20060614/NEWS/60614001...
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 wonder why no European or other country got out in front and made this change earlier?
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.
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:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13054205
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.
http://edition.cnn.com/2013/06/05/travel/sg-airlines-turbule...
or
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)
I think you mean "suppress their use for literally seconds at a time".
A while back, a JetStar pilot forgot to drop the landing gear coming into Singapore because he got a txt message
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1286044/Jetstar-pilo...
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.
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.
What am I missing?
So there is a few reasons.
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.
Sounds like an excellent reason to prohibit bringing untested electronic devices onboard in the first place.
The fact that such a prohibition is not in place means that the whole thing is just so much security theater.
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.