The cell phone warning stickers came first. Then people who actually understood what was happening pointed out that cell phones have never ever caused a pump fire, but roughly a dozen or so pump fires per year caused by static discharge were proven and had been reported to the Petroleum Equipment Institute. Eventually the cell phone stickers disappeared and static discharge stickers went up in their place.
Yeah, that was the claim at the time. I also thought it was pretty far-fetched.
The problems did exist. Most of the time the issues were minor, but I am aware of several cases where cell phones caused monitoring equipment to give incorrect readings.
But cell phone users are also stubbornly stupid and refused to comply with rules, so medical equipment designers just had to cope with it and design all new equipment to be tolerant of cell phone interference.
RF from a cell phone was never the issue, though many people believed it was. The supposed “issue” was that the batteries could spark. Or at least that’s what was claimed.
False logic. Static electricity has been proven to cause pump fires, and yet gas stations still exist and remain open in cold, dry weather.
I am aware of one case of a plane losing communication due to a cell phone, but it was 20+ years ago and it was a flight from Africa to someplace in Europe (Italy, I think?). The woman with the cell phone was arrested when she got off the plane.
The only thing that I have heard of in the U.S. is some pilots complaining about noise in their headsets, slightly annoying but nowhere near enough to cause disruption. This was also many years ago. Maybe one of our resident pilots can give more info on what they have actually seen in the industry.
I am aware of small planes having issues with a cell phone in the cockpit, but it’s usually only one instrument that goes screwy. If your compass suddenly turns right by 90 degrees but all of the other instruments and your GPS, etc. all say you didn’t suddenly make a 90 degree turn, the pilot is just going to assume the one instrument has gone wonky. It’s nowhere near enough to crash the airplane.
That is all that I have heard of, but then again, I’m not a pilot and I don’t work in the avionics industry.
Airport or airplane? If the latter, that’s mostly an abundance of caution by the FAA (which is not necessarily misplaced).
I have a few articles about it, but the upshot is that in the 90s some airliner had their navigation radios blank out. The only thing they could figure was that a passenger was working on a laptop at the time. The feds actually bought the computer from the guy for testing, but could never reproduce the problem. Even so, they decided it’s better not to have computers, phones, etc in use during critical phases of flight. Apart from the theoretical radio wave interference, that’s also a good policy for making evacuations quicker.
Ok, but I’ve got to wonder if these extreme measures of banning phones because you think maybe they might someday present a problem ultimately undermines a general respect for authority and rules that is more harmful than the problems they seek to prevent.
I’m going to mildly disagree here. If one instrument is reading inconsistent with the others, and that’s the only problem that the pilot is dealing with at that moment, it’s likely the pilot will figure out what’s going on, disregard the faulty instrument, and continue the flight without incident. However if this is one of a number of things going on including bad weather, communication workload, traffic, human factors, another dodgy instrument, snakes, etc., you have the makings of disaster.
Not much point to a rule if most people won’t follow it, and why should they if good reasons haven’t been provided.
I observe a general disrespect for posted restrictions from Canadians all the time, and we supposedly are among the more polite, rule abiding cultures.
Legitimacy is crucial to order and there seems to be consensus that imposition of rules without proper legitimacy leads to erosion of trust in wider structures of society. Prohibition being our great example of this.
As I understand it, the main reason the FAA currently bans cell phone use during critical phases of flight is because they want you to be paying attention to the flight attendants in case there is an emergency. It has nothing to do with the cell phone potentially causing issues with the aircraft.
On every flight I have been on, people start taking out their cell phones while the plane is landing. And, as the recent engine fire on the runway showed, people are taking the time to grab their carry-on luggage instead of just getting out of the plane, which they are also not supposed to do. The issue here is that if everyone does what they are supposed to, they can completely evacuate the plane in 90 seconds. But if people are busy talking on their cell phone, not paying attention to the flight attendants, and grabbing their luggage, that time can increase dramatically.
Sooner or later, people are probably going to die because of it.
The laptop study from the 90s did cause concern. But the two issues are not mutually exclusive. From a 2007 article in Air & Space:
In his query, Chavanne adds: “I always thought the real reason [for the personal electronics ban] was to be sure everyone in the aircraft can hear instructions in case of an emergency.” He may be on to something. Airlines would likely use any means to get passengers to pay attention to those pre-takeoff lectures on emergency procedures. “There is probably something to the idea that they want you to listen to the briefing as well,” the FAA’s Dorr says. “Although I don’t find any requirement in the Federal Aviation Regulations that mandates a passenger has to listen.”
I worked on the cell phone side of the world for about 15 years, in what seems like a lifetime ago. One of the big changes even while I was there was the underlying RF technology used. 2G and 3G caused a lot more interference with nearby electronics than current 5G systems. I remember the old days when you could tell your cell phone was about to ring, because the land-line you were on picked up the handshake between the cell phone and the tower as noise.
Combine the newer RF systems with better shielding in critical electronics, and the interference issue has been mitigated in many, many cases.
For what it’s worth - and that may not be much - I was taught that the bigger reason with not using cell SERVICE while in flight, is because towers would be overwhelmed. A phone in the sky can “see” many, many more towers than one on the ground. Handovers become trickier. And so forth. There was no background information provided to show the failure modes, though.
Shit can go wrong upon landing but before the other day, when was there an incident after landing rollout was complete & before the gate that required evacuation? I can’t think of any. People want to catch up on what they’ve missed for the past couple of hours.
I’ve also heard that 90 seconds is BS; that the test evacuation was done by a bunch of young, thin, fit 20-somethings who knew in advance that they were planning on evacuating; that test was not done by a representative cross section of the population who didn’t have advance warning. IOW, a chartered plane for a college sports team could get off in 90 seconds but most normal flights don’t stand a chance of making that target.
As I understand it, the problem was that an airborne cell phone could contact multiple systems, not just multiple towers. Early cell phone systems weren’t designed for this, and dropped calls and all sorts of issues even including total system crashes resulted from it. The cell phone folks had to do a lot of work to make their systems able to handle this.
Of course, even once that was dealt with, you still have the issue that a single cell phone contacting multiple towers does waste resources on each of those towers since only one of those towers needs to actually be communicating with the phone at any given time. I don’t know that I would call it overwhelming, but it’s definitely a waste of resources.
I’ve been reading up on pacemakers since I may need one some day. The advice from the British Heart Foundation is to keep mobile phones away from the pacemaker site.
Part of the problem back in the 90s was that a) prior to that time, substantially nobody in the public carried any electronic device of any kind, and b) Under the FAA’s basic mindset, absolutely everything is absolutely prohibited until it has been comprehensively tested and proven to be safe. Only then can detailed regs be written outlining what few things and use cases have been proven to be safe and are now permitted. Everything else remains prohibited.
Since nobody in the cellphone industry was interested in submitting their new designs for an FAA testing and approval that might take years to receive, the devices appeared en masse as unregulated. And hence FAA-prohibited.
Pretty quickly (i.e. 10 years, which is “pretty quickly” by their standards) FAA submitted to the obvious tide of history, that every passenger would have multiple devices and none of this stuff could be tested against the vast array of possible interferences with airplane systems. So they demanded a certain amount of up-armoring of new avionics designs, and a certain amount of passenger-badgering until those changes percolated through the fleet.
The relentless march of advancing tech in avionics, and even moreso in cellphones, pretty well has eliminated the problem.
This.
I mean there are certain claims which are self refuting (no diss of the OP; it’s still worth asking if it’s been formally acknowledged as debunked) given the ubiquity of cell phones.
If leaving a phone on a plane interfered significantly with comms then we would have had multiple incidents by now and airlines would use detection equipment before takeoff.
Likewise if a phone had a more than one in a million chance of causing a fire at a gas station we’d be hearing about multiple such fires every day.
Nit on the unregulated statement. Cell phones were very much regulated, but not by the FAA. We certainly had to pass FCC testing. In fact, FCC test results are one of the ways information about soon-to-be-released products was identified.
The FAA, rightly IMHO, didn’t accept this as sufficient.
It was a wonderful time for sticker manufacturers.
I have a wireless 900MHz speaker, and live under two airport flight paths. Sometimes, when the volume is all the way down, I can pick up airplane (well, someone’s) communications.
Though risk one-in-a-million risk per visit to the gas station is actually a massively high risk, no one was proposing the risk was that high.
The suggestion was that some percentage of the gas station explosions that do actually happen every year were caused by mobile phones. Even if that percentage was 100% it would still be much rarer one-in-a-million. It’s not an outlandish suggestion (particularly as there did seem to be a correlation between talking on the phone and the explosions) even though it did turn out to be false
Let me put it another way: if the danger of using a cellphone at a gas station was significant, then we would hear about this more and great efforts would be made, because of how ubiquitous cell phones are.
I’m not saying that the market and governments are perfect by any means, but that’s the thing: this would be a worldwide problem.
At least some businesses and governments would have highlighted the risk and be working on the herculean task of ensuring no-one uses a cellphone on their forecourts.
Again, this is not to diss the OP, I’m just saying why we would strongly lean towards assuming this is negligible risk prior to checking the data.