The Great Ongoing Aviation Thread (general and other)

[Senegoid]

In the current GQ thread “How Cold Is Too Cold For Modern Electronics?”, engineer_comp_geek mentions:

@engineer_comp_geek

It’s not usually an issue for most folks, but many cell phones, tablets, and laptops don’t do well at altitudes above 10,000 feet. This isn’t a problem on passenger airplanes since they are pressurized to something like 8,000 feet, but if you use your tablet or laptop in an unpressurized plane you might have an issue. A lot of general aviation pilots use tablets and phones for things like charts and GPS navigation these days, and many of them are in small, unpressurized planes.

I’d like to see some discussion of this point in this thread. As mentioned earlier in this thread, and also in a recent thread about tablets, these mobile electronics get used a lot up there in the skies. Similarly, a great many modern aircraft, including smaller unpressurized ones, are full of modern Garmins and other fancy avionics.

Gliders pilots especially (more than other GA pilots?) like to play way up there as high as we can get. I’ve flown up to 16500 over Tahoe. Just two weeks ago (also mentioned in this thread) one of our local pilots flew wave up to 17999 over Watsonville, CA (and more recently, I just noticed, posted a video of that flight). Yes, even gliders have modern avionics built-in, not to mention the smartphone and tablet apps.

How concerned should we be about this? How well will our electron-intensive toys work — both the avionics (which we might hope are somehow designed to work well at high altitude) as well as our phones and tablets (which maybe aren’t)?