I’ve heard all the rants against using cell phones on airplanes, and that makes me wonder about what other common everyday items may cause problems. What i’m wondering about is microwaves. Would my microwave interfere with aircraft if they were flying low enough? Maybe my conventional storebought microwave wouldn’t be able to, because it has all of the transistors and what not cutting down the power.
But my overall question is, could microwaves if they were strong enough, interfere with aircraft, or doesn’t it work that way?
If your microwave oven was leaking enough signal to bother the electronics of an airplane flying over head, then it would be leaking so much that it would toast your nuts (and the rest of you) as you stood there waiting for the airplane to fall out of the sky.
The reason the microwave doesn’t leak is because of the metal shielding, not the transistors.
You’d have to open the door, defeat all of the safety switches, and point it at the airplane in question, and even then you’re not likely to do much. The most I’d expect you to accomplish is maybe knock out their radio for a short time.
A microwave oven is just a magnetron (a little thing that spins around and makes radio waves, common in radar units in world war ii) a waveguide, which is just a tube for the radio waves to go down, and the box. There’s not a whole lot of transistors and such. To really get some effective radio waves aimed towards the plane you need to get rid of the box and put an antenna at the end of the waveguide. Even then you are only talking about a couple hundred watts of power. That’s not that much. A commercial radio station is going to blast out up to 50,000 watts of radio energy.
Aircraft electronics are specifically shielded against cell phone radiation, as well as other frequencies of electromagnetic interference. Since cell phones are one of the worst offenders, that’s the frequencies that there are the most specific tests and regulations. Microwave ovens work on frequencies very close to cell phones, so the electronics are going to be very well shielded against them.
Planes fly over cell phone towers, police radar, grocery stores (that little box above the door that causes it to automatically open is usually blasting out radio waves to detect if you come in the door), and all sorts of communications towers on their travels. I’m aware of at least one incident where a woman on the plane managed to interfere with the communications radio of the plane, but I’m not aware of any other instances where any sort of electromagnetic interference has effected any system on a plane. Still, the FAA always wants to take the better safe than sorry approach, and since there are a couple of unexplained crashes out there, you never know.