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Comment by rschmitty | Hacker News Reader

Hey man what are you doing! We can finally use our devices during take off and now you hint at keeping them off permanently! Eek! :P

I'm sure the first battery meltdown/fire on a plane is going to cause a riot in the news but the odds...

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That did cross my mind when I posted it.

I should point out that I don't know what is true. It just seems to be a contradiction that every passenger can take on board and use whatever they want in-flight, yet transponders specially engineered to be safe on a plane must be able to be disabled.

I suspect the answer is that the transponder doesn't need to be under the control of anyone on the plane.

The answer is that when there's 100+ planes parked at an airport it's confusing to have 100's of transponders on as other planes are trying to land.

so just have a load cells on the undercarriage and a circuit that detects when a plane is landed so that you can only turn off the transponder when the plane is landed.

Maybe it has to do with the location on the transponder? A laptop in baggage or an electrical component buried deep in the bowels of the plane would be hard to get to in the event of a potential fire. A passenger's laptop would be fairly easy to put out with a fire extinguisher.

This device is a bigger piece of equipment using more power, with physical interconnects to other areas on a plan. Moreover it normally not located a place where you can lift it up and throw it in a bucket of water, or rip out its battery if something should go wrong.

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