Regional differences. Every major US airline allows phones and tablets to be used at all times, even during takeoff and landing, as long as the device is in airplane mode. Same with every flight between Japan and US that I’ve been on in the past few years (JAL, ANA, American, United).
Also, I’ve noticed that on most new phones, airplane mode only turns off the cellular signal, and keeps the WiFi on. I think it used to turn both off.
Quite probably; it is a U.S.-based board, even though we have many non-U.S. posters. (Also, LSLGuy is a commercial pilot for a U.S. airline, IIRC.)
My old (pre-3G) cellphones used to regularly cause interference with the radios in my car and house, if they were set too closely to them – a sort of electronic chattering sound for 5 or 10 seconds at a stretch, every so often. I’m guessing that it was a similar kind of interference, at a similar frequency?
I only fly on US airlines domestically. Other airlines and other countries may have their own rules. The only rules I have seen in the last few years are that large devices have to go under the seat during takeoff and landing and all devices have to be in airplane mode from the time they make the announcement after the door closes until the plane turns off the runway. Nobody pays attention to the last part. As soon as the plane comes near the runway, phones go off beeping, buzzing, and ringtoning. Oh, and NO GALAXY S7s or hoverboards.
Before they relaxed the rules, you were supposed to completely turn off the phone in flight. But the only persons who actually did that were the idiots who were still using the phone when the flight attendants came by for their final safety check. They would stand there until the passenger turned it off. Everyone else would just slip the phone into their bag or pocket before the flight attendants did their check. I don’t think they powered off their phones because it takes it phone a couple of minutes to boot up after it is powered up, but everybody’s phone was ready to go on touchdown.
Setting you phone in airplane mode is a good idea anyway. If you don’t, you will unnecessarily run down your batteries as the phone futilely tries to connect to a cell site in high-power mode for the length of your flight.
Back in the days when hand-held cell phones first became popular (and they were actually phones, not hand-held computers with a phone feature added as an afterthought) the rule was that you had to power down the phone before entering the jetway (the corridor that connects the building to the plane). That was rather extreme. But I remember one flight where there was a long line backed up onto the jetway and the flight attendant saw a man talking on his phone. She became just livid and started screaming at him “Turn that thing off. You’re going to crash the plane and we are all going to die!!!” She really turned red in the face.
Obviously she was having a bad day.
Yes and I take that part back somewhat.
From googling, the “no phones, period” thing is mainly a chinese airlines thing.
While I’m a frequent flyer, most of my flights are to, from, or within china, so it seems I was guilty of sampling error 
OTOH, most of us, myself included, are guilty of US-only sampling error. 
Though sometimes we mention the limitations of our sampling.
A lot of the issue is “What does ‘use your phone’ mean?” to different people.
Ref **Eyebrows 0f Doom ** in #20, there is just starting to be a trend *away *from seatback screens, at least on narrow-body aircraft. This after 5 years of frenzied growth in new and retrofit installations of seatback screens.
The assumption today which affects orders for aircraft arriving in the near future is that substantially everybody who wants to watch vid will bring their own screen. The airplane just has to provide enough WiFi bandwidth that everybody can stream from the on-board server that would otherwise be feeding all those heavy, expensive, unreliable seatback screens.
There had been a big effort to retrofit seatback screens into the middle-aged aircraft with enough life left in them. That’s quickly going on hold pretty much industry-wide, at least in the US. They’re still installing increased bandwidth to the ground, increased bandwidth within the cabin, and bigger capacity onboard video servers. But leaving off the seatback monitors, instead providing each seat with 110v electrical outlets with “universal” (AKA one size fits most) connectors to plug in your device for charging.
BTW tablet use in the cockpit (not just the cabin) as been authorized since 2011: FAA approves use of Apple's iPad as electronic flight bag | AppleInsider
Re “make the compass go wonky”, here is the instrument panel of a 787: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/gI5PJYsHKqE/maxresdefault.jpg
Here is the panel of an Airbus A350 XWB: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e0/Airbus_A-350_XWB_F-WWYB_cockpit_view.jpg
You won’t see any compass there because the raw data from all instruments are integrated and presented on the Electronic Flight Instrumentation System (EFIS). There are heading indicators but these are driven from a melding of many raw data sources. This raw data includes triple-redundant inertial nav, triple-redundant GPS, triple-redundant ILS receivers, and triple-redundant VOR, and probably somewhere deep down, triple-redundant magnetic compass sensors. This data is blended according to some algorithm and presented to the pilot in different ways based on flight regime.
The vast majority of the time the aircraft is flying on autopilot. When it’s not on autopilot, the pilot is often following the Flight Director, which is a set of “V bars” or “Cross bars” presented on the EFIS as a target. It’s the same attitude target the autopilot would be following if engaged, but the pilot manually following it by hand. He’s not looking at raw data from a magnetic compass.
The pilot can optionally select specific raw data for presentation on the EFIS but outside of this, I don’t think pilot ever sees magnetic compass data.
If there is some underlying disagreement between the raw data sources, there is probably a built-in priority system based on historical confidence levels to deprecate that before it’s blended with the overall flight guidance advice. In some cases an EFIS alert could be raised warning of disagreement in raw data sources.
However on a modern commercial airliner, the pilot won’t “follow the compass” into a mountain because he’s never looking at the compass anyway.
Galaxy tab 7 are the ones with the battery problem the S7 is fine.
Oops. Sorry.
I picked that example because it was something that I had personal experience with. The plane in question was a small single propeller plane, a piper cub type of thing but I don’t recall the exact model plane. It had old style analog gauges, not a digital display panel. The pilot was showing me that the cell phone caused the compass to deflect, but the GPS and VOR both still gave accurate readings. I’ve also read about cell phones screwing up communications, causing headset noise, and interfering with GPS systems.
I am not a pilot and I don’t regularly fly anywhere. Thirty-ish years ago I worked for a company that made airborne radar and flir systems. In addition to design work on those systems (and part of a fire control system for a helicopter) I had to do things like qualify a power supply for RF noise so that it could get installed in a fighter jet, as the power supply kept failing the noise spec due to too much emitted RF at the power supply’s chopper frequency.
So while I have some avionics experience, I was never a pilot and I have no cockpit experience at all. Most of what I know about cockpit instruments is second-hand information, combined with my three decades of electrical engineering experience where I have often dealt with safety-critical RF noise issues (in my current job I do mostly industrial control, but when you are controlling things like nuclear fuel production or the production of phosgene gas, safety and RF noise issues are just as critical for us as they are for airlines - one good fuck-up and you’ve got another Bhopal, India on your hands).
LSLGuy and our other resident pilots on the other hand do have actual cockpit experience and can tell you much better than I can about exactly what problems electronics can cause in a modern jetliner.
No, it’s the Note 7.
(Galaxy Tab is a series of tablets, and there is no Tab 7. There is a Tab A 7, but that one doesn’t explode either. )
Yes it is very critical, in an ILS approach to near minimums or especially in a Cat IIIB landing which is zero ceiling and runway visibility so poor a landing requires automated “rollout guidance”.
I have personally seen consumer automotive GPS units deviate or malfunction due to consumer electronic devices. Imagine if that was an airliner during an instrument landing.
Besides traditional ILS, commercial aircraft are increasingly dependent on GPS not just for en route navigation but also for instrument landing at airports without ILS equipment. GPS approaches are currently approved for Cat I (200 ft ceiling, 1/2 mile runway visibility), and there are plans to improve this at certain airports to essentially Cat III by 2018: http://aviationweek.com/business-aviation/going-blind-zerozero-landings
If you can’t see anything out the window but grey fog until touchdown, the life of everybody on the plane is totally dependent on the landing system guidance. You obviously don’t want a cell phone jeopardizing this. However airliner GPS systems must be triple redundant and each system is using WAAS and GBAS to cross-check and verify integrity. They won’t entrust people’s lives to a system unless it is essentially bulletproof: https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/ato/service_units/techops/navservices/gnss/faq/laas/
The probability of guidance failure due to cellular interference during a precision approach must be nearly zero, otherwise the flight attendants would be running detection wands across everybody before landing. A certain % of passengers will not follow instructions and another significant % just don’t understand how their cell phone works. Proof of this is how many people can’t figure out how to stop their phone from ringing in a public place. If the risk of cell phone interference with airliner navigation was not nearly zero, they’d confiscate all phones or have an active RF monitoring system on each plane. They don’t do that so the risk must be vanishingly small.
All of the above is good info, however, if I may pick a nit, the reason you don’t see a magnetic compass in those photos is that you are looking in the wrong place. You will find the standby magnetic compass on an A350 near the top of the centre windscreen pillar. Photo below:
The B787 has it in a similar place:
You are correct that the pilot wouldn’t normally be “looking at the compass anyway”. Aside from instrument cross checks at the start of the flight, if the pilots find themselves needing to look at the standby magnetic compass, lots of things have gone horribly wrong for them* ;). My last simulator session involved loss of all four engines due to volcanic ash. For a period of time the aircraft was powered by the battery only. We still didn’t have to look at the standby compass!
*Actually I’m overstating the case there a bit. Probably the most likely reason you’d have to check the standby compass was if the captain and FOs EFIS headings disagreed. You’d then be directed by the checklist (and common bloody sense hopefully) to check the standby compass to work out which side is correct. I suspect something as modern as an A350 would still have a similar checklist, though perhaps not.
joema, IMO you overstate both the sophistication of the airliners and the depth of FAA oversight on the specific topic of cellphones, tablets, etc. Collectively termed Personal Electronic Devices (“PED”) in the argot.
Tablet use in the cockpit has been authorized for some carriers for 3-4 years now. Back in 2011 was the start of a multi-year test effort leading up to routine use today for many carriers. But up until last month, Jan 2017, all tablet use in airliner cockpits had to be in airplane mode with zero emitters on. The FAA is just now starting to approve WiFi use in flight after sufficient EMI testing and also hardening the on-board hotspot to impede hacking from devices in the cabin. Approval is rolling out now only on a per airline / per tablet type / per aircraft basis. With only FAA approved software in use.
Certainly there are some airliners with all the fancy modern stuff. But WAAS / LAAS / GBAS augmentation is installed in only a tiny fraction of the fleet. And GPS-based approach nav is used only under relatively benign conditions. IOW, in conditions not severe enough to warrant our extra PA to the pax to turn off all their toys.
In fact, a decent fraction of the US airliner fleet is absolutely positively utterly immune to GPS interference. Because no GPS is installed at all.
You are correct that the general trend over time is to increasingly use WAAS / LAAS and GPS-based approaches and to slowly de-emphasize ILS. But it’ll be 30 years at least before ILS goes the way of the MF range, especially for severely poor weather.
You last paragraph is sort-of valid and sort-of not. The FAA has wholesale abdicated their usual hyperactive safety attitude when it comes to PED interference. To their credit, unlike King Canute they have recognized they can’t turn the tide on consumer use of PEDs and non-compliance with any and all practical rules.
So they’re requiring up-armoring of aircraft on a forward fit basis only, asking us to make these partly ineffective warnings and PAs and walk-throughs, and meantime are keeping their fingers crossed we won’t lose too many airplanes.
Said another way, yes the odds of a mishap are small. But compared to the FAA’s usual zealousness over the last micro-tidbit of safety, they’re yuugely laying down on the job over this one. Whether one wants to consider that glass to be 99.999% full or 0.0001% empty depends on your POV. Normally they insist on, and you enjoy the fruits of, 99.999999% full and 0.0000001% empty. A 1000x reduction in statistical safety margin would be a big deal in many other contexts. Perhaps no so much in this one since the rest of the odds are pretty favorable already.
GPSalliance.org estimates that 80% of commercial airliners are already GPS equipped (in some fashion): http://www.gpsalliance.org/aviation.aspx
ADS-B requires GPS, and it will be mandated by any aircraft operating in US controlled airspace by January 1, 2020, which is 2 yrs and 11 months away. So any commercial aircraft which don’t have GPS by January 1, 2020 won’t be flying. ADS-B requires WAAS-augmented GPS plus RAIM integrity monitoring.
There are already over 4,000 GPS LPV published approaches which have 200 ft AGL minimums, which is basically CAT I. I’m not saying airliners use those but they exist and are in wide usage by the aggregate fleet: Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS)
There is a difference in how GPS is used in various scenarios, likewise the timeframe for commercial carriers adopting GPS en-route navigation and approaches. However this doesn’t materially affect the hypothetical scenario of a cell phone interfering with aviation GPS navigation and guidance. GPS is widely used today in commercial aviation and by 2020 GPS use will be universal.
Augmented GPS is technically capable of Cat III autoland approaches and the FAA says commercial carries might start using this by 2018: http://aviationweek.com/commercial-aviation/faa-targets-2018-gps-based-autoland-capability
In general airliners have triple-redundant equipment (autopilots, radar altimeters, flight management systems, etc) for this mode, which I assume would include triple-redundant GPS whenever that is implemented.
So in the context of commercial aviation, the OP question is not merely would a cell phone could affect a single instrument, but would it identically affect triple redundant instruments and if not how would the EFIS/EICAS/ECAM system handle diverging results. That potential already exists today with traditional nav and ILS, so in a sense GPS precision approaches and ADS-B traffic management will not change that. However consumer GPS units are very susceptible to RF so it raises the question whether certified, multiply-redundant, augmented aviation GPS with RAIM integrity monitoring will be more vulnerable than traditional instruments.
Good info all and no disagreemet with any of it.
My belief is we’ll see less trouble over time as more of the older rattier airplanes are retired, to be replaced by airplanes and avionics designed from the ground up with active PED interference in mind.
