I must wonder about weighing the inconvenience or discomfort for those in charge of making up the rules (i.e. pilots) against the needs of those who must abide by those rules (i.e. the flying public). "Oh, shit, i get these annoying buzzes in my ear sometimes, so let’s ban all cellphone and laptop use for the next few decades. "
Thank you, well said.
More: Do we need to debunk the commonly held knowledge that swimming shortly after eating (wait times vary) causes certain death? Or sitting too close to a living room tv causes eye problems? Remember duct taping windows for anthrax? Collecting aluminum pull tabs for extraordinary cash?
Sometimes, it can be funny: “If you ask someone if they’re an undercover cop, they can’t say they aren’t. That’s entrapment.” Those do get conclusively debunked, time & again, but the myth persists.
There was a story trending a few weeks ago about the hidden dangers of black plastic kitchen servingware. It was complete horseshit, of course, on the same examination we’re talking about, but there was a surprising retraction a few days later.
I don’t know, I think some of those are a little different.
e.g. on the black plastic thing, that was a scientific paper with detailed data. However, the final risk calculation included an error (I’m not sure whether in the paper itself, or the press release) hence it blew up more than it warranted.
There almost certainly are things in our environment that increase our risk of certain cancers significantly, without us yet knowing conclusively. So this kind of claim is not one with an immediate obvious answer.
I am going to go a bit contrarian here.
At one time cell phones used conventional (“old school”) switches with mechanical contacts. Any such switch has the potential to arc (“spark”), especially when opened while carrying substantial current. If the switch is not hermetically sealed there is a non-zero probability of ignition in a combustible atmosphere. Small, but not zero.
By the time cell phones stated becoming ubiquitous most (if not all) the switches moved over to membrane switches which by their nature are hermetic over the short term. Power switching was handled by transistors or semiconductor relays. Sources of arcing were pretty much eliminated, driving the probability of ignition down to zero.
Considering that the premise was never “cell phone at gas pump = disaster” but rather “cell phone at gas pump = slight chance of disaster”, it’s better to say that the warning has been rendered obsolete rather than debunked.
I can certainly see a higher risk with walkie-talkies, which relied on mechanical switches to be constantly switching the transmitter on and off whenever the “talk” button is toggles. Plus generally really cheaply made, so low-quality switches.
That was one of the worst episodes of Mythbusters. Their “experiment” was to put a dummy into a box with gas fumes and a cell phone, then call the cell phone to see if it would blow things up. They did not have the dummy actually operate any of the cell phone switches - just rang the phone. They then used this single anecdote to “debunk” the possibility of a low-probability event.
Now on to cell phone interference with medical devices and avionics. Early analog (AMPS) cell phones transmitted FM modulated voice in a frequency channel assigned by the cell tower. All the transmit power concentrated in a narrow frequency range, with a non-random message to boot. Medical equipment was not designed to be insusceptible to a 3W FM transmitter operating a couple of feet away. Likewise avionics were not designed to operate with a hundred or so FM transmitters all broadcasting at max power while searching for a cell tower.
Two things happened simultaneously to mitigate interference: First, equipment manufacturers started taking nearby cell phone interferers into account when designing their equipment (there’s a whole field called EMC - electromagnetic compatibility). Second, and more significantly, cell phone moved away from narrowband analog transmission into wideband transmission (starting with CDMA) so that the peak interference was reduced many orders of magnitude and randomized so that it looks like noise.
So again at one time a problem (with a much higher likelihood of impact than the gas pump scenario) but much less of one with current technology.
I’m glad you don’t work for the FAA.
This is a joke right? Because very obviously I am not claiming any safety agency base its decisions on rules of thumb instead of empirical data.
I used to live near BWI airport many years ago. Depending on which runway they were using, passing airplanes would cause all kinds of issues, usually interference with radios and flickering on your TV (that was back in the old fashioned analog TV days). I assume that the interference was from the plane’s radars and radio altimeters and such.
I’m surprised that your only issue is picking up RF communications.
Since we’re back on airplanes …
The issue with early cellphone interference was not with comm radios. But with nav radios, the things that pre-GPS guided us across the country and even today are usually guiding us down to the runway in crap weather.
Interference in those leads to misleading readings, or no readings at all. Now we’re lost, or being subtly misled to end up somewhere other than where desifred. Sucks especially if we’re just a couple hundred feet above the ground when somebody pushed [send] to initiate a call. Landing on a nearby freeway instead of a runway can be bad.
No airplanes crashed, but there were a bunch of problems detected and reported. Lots of go-arounds were triggered. It used to be a much bigger deal than it is today.
Respectfully, don’t you think passengers deserved a lot of well-publicized notices that cell phones and laptops were now okay to use once the point was reached that it was no longer a big deal? I do.
I think (I might be prejudiced here) that the airlines/airports/pilots/etc. just decided “Fuck them, we don’t want the slightest inconvenience to us, or the maximum convenience for passengers, as long as we can plausibly cling to the fiction that laptops and cel phones present a significant mortal danger.”
I mean, the whole reason I posed this question (about the gas pumps, but it applies to airplane passengers as well) is that I never noticed that all the scary warnings were no longer thought valid.
I thought the main issue with cell phones on planes was a lot of phones moving really fast and connecting from one cell tower to the next? That caused a lot of problems with the cell network.
Planes have built-in WiFi and you can use Bluetooth headphones with no problem to the plane.
As to gas pumps, I remember in the 70s the attendant pumping the gas would be smoking a cigarette (back when there were people who’d pump your gas for you at the station).
As a kid I was appalled. And, while it does not seem smart I can’t think of a time it ever caused a problem. A cell phone has to be a lot less dangerous than that I’d think.
I think as well that it’s always easier to tighten the ratchet than do the opposite.
Sure, you might be 99.99% sure that it’s never going to cause any issue. But given that if you relax that rule and there somehow is an issue, you’re fugged, yeah let’s leave it as is / let some other agency make that call.
I’d posit that there are a large number of travelers still reluctant to fire up their laptops and cel phones simply because they remember the warnings and do not remember (because they never got) a notification that it was now okay to use them.
That was, and still is, the FCC’s objection.
The FAA had their own list of objections to the devices even being powered on, airplane mode or not. “Airplane mode” was invented by the FCC as a way to address their concerns, not FAA’s.
I’d also posit that there are a lot of people who don’t think the rules apply to them or, some just forget to do it despite staff instructions (which many tune out after hearing it for the hundredth time).
It’s pretty clear you don’t travel much, if at all.
Announcements about when and how cellphones may or may not be used and when and how laptops may be used are legion. As are announcements about how to use the airplane’s Wi-Fi to access on-board entertainment and/or the off-board internet. Using Wi-Fi is darn hard if you don’t have any of your devices turned on.
Even if somehow you (any you) were deaf and blind to all this, the simple example of the other 5 people in your row using their devices from when they sit down until when they get up to leave will quickly educate you on the reality of the matter.
I travel some. My impression is that there are passengers who’ve had it drummed into their heads that these things are forbidden so they tend to view those using laptops and cell phones as rules-breakers. Someone pointed out above that airlines want people paying attention to the announcements so they forbid the use of cel phones and laptops while this prattle is going on, despite my (formerly) being a very frequent flyer, on the same flights and same planes, who felt perfectly safe assuming that the announcement I heard on Tuesday still applied to the announcement I was hearing on Wednesday. My point about arbitrary and pointless edicts undermining respect for authority applies here as well.
If there was a significant risk of a phone causing adverse interference with a plane’s comms, then there would be a federal law prohibiting it, along with a stiff fine if found guilty. Similar to smoking in a plane’s lavatory.
Same with using a cell phone at a gas pump… if there was a significant risk, there would be state laws against it. (Smoking, of course, is risky around a pump, and some states make it a crime, e.g. Virginia § 46.2-819.4.)
Has the “cell phone while crossing the street = disaster” warning been debunked?
There is a good reason not to use your cell phone while pumping*. That’s why gas stations also have “spill kits”.
*Not as good as the reasons used to be. Two of the girls I was in school with filled up their trunk when they missed the gas tank nozzle.
Has anyone checked into that ‘Step on a crack’ thing?
I’ve broken my mother’s back many times. Fortunately for her, she’s long dead.
Should it be? Or am I whooshed?
I personally have come very close to being run over at speed while talking on my mobile while crossing a street. Not looking at it, not typing on it, just talking on it held to my head. The car was coming from the side opposite the phone and my raised arm, so I can’t even plead that the car was hidden from my view.