Mystic, is your whole point that you think that cell phones don’t work on airplanes, and that therefore the 9/11 phone calls were hoaxes, or were otherwise part of the “window dressing” of the conspiracy?
If cell phones DIDN’T work on planes, the FAA wouldn’t need to have rules against using them, would they? Duh.
And what about this?
So, what, these folks have installed phones that won’t work anyway, and are therefore charging what must be some truly extraordinarily clueless business travelers three bucks a minute to make imaginary phone calls? “Hello? Hello? Dang, this thing isn’t working…oh, well, I’ll go ahead and pretend it’s the home office on the other end…” I’m flashing on Bob Newhart doing one of his phone routines…
I think you’re making a small, erroneous assumption here, the fallacy of the excluded middle. On an airplane, it would be possible for a cell phone to “not work” - in the sense of being unable to make and receive calls - while “working” - in the sense of transmitting signals which could interfere with the electronics of the airplane. On the factual matter of can cell phones make and receive calls from airplanes, I’m with those who say yes.
(1) Alleging that a group of fellas are caught on tape on their way to a attack, are recorded on radios in the middle of the attack, and have a leader taped later as admitting/celebrating the attack, it ain’t “extraordinary” to blame 'em for it.
(2) To paraphrase you, you are the one who is claiming that a group of people committed and covered up the crime. The burden of proof is on you. You can consider the rest of the world defense attorneys for the CIA or whomever else you see lurking in the shadows.
And by the way, is your theory on the BBC transcript that it is unreasonable for a guy to give his full name to his mom, but more reasonable for the supervillian conspirators to make such an obvious mistake? I don’t think so.
A cell phone can be turned on on the airplane and emit radio waves, which can interfere with the plane’s electronics. That is why the FAA bans them. My hypothesis is that the cell phone is unable to establish or maintain connection with a ground cell because the plane is going too fast. Somebody said that a ground cell is 10 miles in diameter. If a plane is going 600 miles per hour, that is the same as 10 miles per minute. That means that the plane would enter a new cell every minute. It takes a finite time for the cell phone to do an electronic handshake and establish a connection, so you would have less than 1 minute to have a phone conversation before your connection was broken. Furthermore, since cell phones on the ground rely on line of sight to connect to the nearest antenna, and a plane in the air could “see” multiple antennas by virtue of its position in the air, it is possible it would not be able to “decide” which cell to connect to or would connect to multiple cells simultaneously. I am simply asking on the basis of physics and geometry if these cell phone calls could have been made.
The seat back phones are radio phones and work on the same principle as the planes plane to plane or plane to ground radio.
And your reasoning for why phone networks are unable to deal with events occuring at periods less than a minute is …
Why should the phone “decide” ? It’s the piss-poor, cut-price bit of electronics trying to communicate with the relatively no-limitations, buy-the-best-available since it’s a one-off bit of kit. As a general rule, it’s not up to the phone which cell it connects to. It’s up to the cells. Which happen to be connected together into a network. So even if the phone can “see” multiple antennee, those antenee won’t all try connect to that phone. Because, surprisingly, they’re part of a network.
Yes, one can just imagine that aircraft speeds could f**k this up. However, you’re really not convincing on the basics of the matter.
Physics and geometry come into it, but at the end of the day it’s primarily a matter of standards and network planning.
mystic2311: You got a cite for that? (On the usage of cell phones on planes)
Well seeing as that Airbus (you know, the plane makers) have done experimentation showing that cellphones can be used. From this article from New Scientist.
It seems the only reason there’s a ban on cellphones in planes is the fear they might affect the avionics (there’s a better-safe-then-sorry) approach being used) and of course to protect the airlines own extremely costly built-in cellphone service.
But that’s just whether the phones affect the navigation systems (which they don’t). When it comes to the actual usage of cells it does work. Because companies already use cell phones from planes (mainly corporate jets). And these companies are plannig to introduce these same features on commercial planes once they get FAA approval (who are still sticking to their better-safe-then-sorry approach). From this article
In rural areas, cells are much larger than in urban ones and as such allow much slower handover. But even handover of once a minute (say in areas with smaller cell radius) is easily done.
So the person best placed to know what he might or might not say to his mother, not only commented on his choice of words, she offered an explanation. And what bit did mystic2311 choose to overlook ?
But I see - we were already meant to have concluded that she’s part of the conspiracy.
So cellular towers can be anywhere from 1 to 20 miles apart. It all depends on geography, population, and whether the phone company thinks there are enough people who would use their service to justify building another million-dollar tower.
So, if your whole hypothesis is based on the assumption that the cellular towers in the Washington, D.C. area, the western Pennsylvania area, and the Greater New York area were all 10 miles apart, and that therefore planes flying 600 mph would have outflown the signals, then I think you need to rethink your whole hypothesis. Since these are all fairly heavily populated areas, with lots of customers for cell phones, I’d bet anything you like that the cellular towers in those parts are considerably closer together than 10 miles.
Here are maps showing cellular phone coverage in Western Pennsylvania. As you can see, there is plenty of coverage following Flight 93 more or less down the Interstate corridor from Pittsburgh to Shanksville, which is not far from Somerset on the cell phone map (Shanksville is too small to show up).
Flights 11, 175, 77, traveling through the even more heavily populated areas of New England and the greater Washington D.C. area, where the cell towers are probably quite thick on the ground, wouldn’t have had any trouble getting calls through, no matter how fast the planes were flying.
However, in all fairness, I did find the “plane is going too fast for a cell phone to work” factoid.
So, the 9/11 planes were low enough to be able to contact the cellular towers (“cruise altitudes” usually means like 30,000 feet), and they were all traveling through areas where there were a lot of towers, and so the fact that they were going 600 mph didn’t signify. They were able to make the necessary connections and get the calls through.
P.S. In the context of this thread, it’s ironic that while Googling around on “cell phones work airplanes”, I keep finding people pointing to the 9/11 phone calls as proof that cell phones do work on airplanes.
