I'm not at all discounting this John. But--and this sounds awful--two
instances in the countless flights every day (and I'm on a lot of those
flights, so don't think I'm blowing it off) isn't worth the sturm and
drang on the plane. Of all the infinite number of things than can
result in a plane making a sudden unscheduled stop in a lake, two
instances of radio interference isn't something as a flier I want to be
protected from if it means empowering a nasty underpaid attitude in
heels to stand next to my seat barking "SIR!" at my seatmate
passive-aggressively for five minutes. I'll risk the crash two out of
500,000 times. I'm willing to bet drunk pilots, poor maintenance, and
cosmic radiation are a far greater risk to me in the air.
The best ones are the attendants that want to get into it with
passengers wearing noise cancelling headphones. There's no way to tell
if most of them are powered on or off, so they simply make sure they're
not wearing them. As another passenger, what if they're still on? If
the goal is to eliminate RF interference and it's so damn vital...then
you pick those things up and take out the batteries. Otherwise it's not
that important and you're just being a angry b*&ch.
But I *am* all for using technology to render the voice capabilities of
other technology un-useable. You wanna crash the plane? Fine. But
keep the rest of the cattle in here with me quiet until it does, yeah?
Or: let them play their Game Boys if it keeps them off the damn phone.
On 10/14/2011 9:07 AM, John Innis wrote:
> I work for a company that designs and builds the computers and
> displays that pilots use to fly aircraft. I can tell you that they
> have been two confirmed incidents of a PED (personal electronic
> device) causing interference with these systems. One was a CD player
> with no wireless capability at all (just a really noisy local
> oscillator in exactly the wrong frequency range), the other was a
> laptop PC with an operating wireless card. The problem is that all
> electronic devices produce RF noise. Most of the consumer grade stuff
> is so poorly made that while the prototype MIGHT have passed FCC
> testing, the actual units that people buy are often out of compliance
> in terms of the amount of noise the produce. A lot of the computer
> systems used to keep airplanes in the air are hardened against this
> noise as best we can, but we still depend on being able to receive
> good RF signal from GPS, VOR, ILS, and a host of other systems that
> allow the plane to navigate and communicate. Until we get serious
> about testing consumer products for noise radiation, it is a good idea
> to ban them from airliners. Just because it has only happen twice,
> doesn't mean that the next time won't involve a life threatening
> situation for someone you love.
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