I think it would fly anyway. If it was really that dangerous, why are you aloud to take a cellphone on board anyway?
If this subject has been discussed before, please sent me a link and ignore.
Most likely an uneventful take off.
The prohibition on using cellphones is because they might cause interference, not because they actually do on a regular basis. There is a little anecdotal evidence of some of effect at some times, but nothing that would crash an airplane. The concern would be mostly with navigational instruments - it would really be annoying to be off course while flying over, say, the Pacific and wind up far away from your intended destination.
IIRC MythBusters did a story on this and found that some cell phones running on the 800MHz band may have a tendency to cause some issues but the final verdict was the myth was busted.
The reality is that pretty much everything in a critical system in a modern passenger airplane is double shielded from RF.
I can tell you that a number of my customers that fly helicopters use their cell phones in the air throughout the day and they’re in much closer proximity to critical systems and none of them have crashed yet
Are helicopters commonly equipped with autopilot and fly-by-wire control systems (not a rhetorical question; I’m genuinely curious)?
I’m not aware of cell phone interference having caused an aircraft to crash, but there have been cases of interference in the past. It’s very rare, but because of the typically large number of lives at stake, and the fact that we don’t know for sure which cell phones might interact oddly with which aircraft electronic system, the prudent choice is to just tell passengers not to use any electronic device at all when the aircraft is below 10,000 feet.
Autopilot yes it is out there. Fly by wire…iono.
It’s also worth pointing out that aircraft have had two way radios, both AM airband as well as FM for a very long time
Actually, you folks who note about RF shielding are pretty much correct. However, that’s really not why you can’t use your cellphone below 10,000 feet. The primary reason is the same reason you can’t use your laptop or your I-pod.
Below 10,000 feet (either on TO or land) is when an airplane is most likely to have an accident, and for everyone’s safety, it’s best to have people semi-attentive to the world around them, not to their toys. And it’s best to have fewer potential projectiles in people’s hands during that phase of flight.
This makes sense, but I thought it was about the RF interference. I know at work there can be problems if someone puts their Blackberry next to the phone. The people on the conference call hear buzzing on the line.
For that matter, when I listen with my noise-cancelling earphones, I pick up interference from my phone searching for Wifi, or (oddly) from the on-board communications on the commuter train.
Just in case they needs me to fly the plane? Cool!
Older planes may not be appropriately shielded against several hundred passengers’ worth of electronic devices being in use. Many aircraft designs predate cellphone technology, and while there are fewer of these old planes in North America and Western Europe (and the remaining ones have possibly had their wiring replaced), in other parts of the world this might not be the case.
We tend to think of planes as being “modern” technology, but the original B747 is 30+ years old; the original B727 design is 40 years old, etc. It takes years to upgrade an aircraft (though of course, both these types have had avionics and other upgrades since), let alone design a new one, so technology capabilities onboard will always lag behind the latest and greatest land-based technologies.
Back in March I posted a quote from a current occurrence of wifi technology interfering in testing with onboard avionics. The article was reported from the Air Transport Intelligence news (received in the Curt Lewis Flight Safety Information newsletter on March 10):
Modern electronics, on a modern avionics package with the design intent of working together still caused problems. It’s not a trivial problem to solve.
And quotingmyself:
Is the 747 on a treadmill?
Too late to edit: as for what could happen… in the situation I quoted above, the pilots lose their flight displays, therefore lose airspeed, altitude, attitude, direction, engine status…pretty much every bit of information they need in order to fly the plane (ok, so there’s the backup conventional compass and horizon, but the point stands). Best-case scenario, they manage without or systems come back online. Worst-case scenario, the plane crashes and everyone dies.
worst case…taking out people on the ground too…hitting an oil pipeline in the process…which ignites a nuclear powerplant…
There’s also the problem on the carrier end–that is, my understanding is that a good bit of the issue is that cell phones at 10,000 feet will see multiple cell towers as approximately the same distance and cause a disproportionate network load as they rapidly drop and connect to new towers at several hundred miles per hour.
It’s my understanding that a few companies are doing the research to certify on-aircraft cell towers that connect to the rest of the phone grid by satellite to alleviate those particular concerns.
As someone who designs electronic stuff for a living, I can tell you that cell phones can potentially interfere with all kinds of things. As a practical matter though, modern aircraft are designed to be rugged and reject this type of interference. I’ve been able to talk to a few pilots about this, and all of the big jet pilots I’ve spoken to have never had a cell phone cause an instrumentation or navigation problem (which would have been my first guess) but every single one of them complained that cell phones caused annoying noise in their headsets at some time or another.
On older small planes (your old Pipe Cub type of planes) I have heard of cell phones interfering with instruments as well as communication.
Pilots aren’t idiots, so even if a moron on a cell phone makes them lose contact with air traffic control (which has happened) they have procedures where they can still land the plane safely, and in the case of instrument problems, they won’t blindly follow one wonky instrument reading and fly into the ground. If the compass suddenly turns south they are going to know that the compass is out of whack and will use other methods to determine their direction.
In the early days of cell phones, an airborne phone could wreak all kinds of havoc on ground systems, not so much because they could reach multiple towers, but because they could reach multiple systems. The handoff between phone systems hadn’t been designed to handle that and not only would huge amounts of resources get bogged down trying to handle it, but sometimes the ground systems would crash and everyone’s calls would be dropped. Because cell phone users insist on using their phones no matter what (it often seems like the best way to encourage someone to use a cell phone in a particular area is to hang a sign saying you can’t use it there) the cell phone companies just had to cope with it. Many improvements were made and airborne cell phones no longer cause major problems on the ground any more.
There is still the issue of airborne cell phones tying up communication channels on multiple towers simultaneously, which the FCC doesn’t like because it wastes bandwidth resources. This also factors into the FCC’s decision to forbid cell phones from communicating while in flight.
Indications are that the Air France Flight 447 pilots did pretty much exactly that.
The pilots were certainly not idiots. But the problem with airplanes is that it only takes a few minutes of temporary idiocy to kill a few hundred people.
FAA Factsheet - Cell Phones, Wi-Fi and Portable Electronics on Airplanes
91.21-1B - Use of Portable Electronic Devices Aboard Aircraft (PDF Warning) - Provides aircraft operators with information and guidance for assistance in the compliance to FAR Section 91.21.
You may/may not agree with the above, but there it is.
I can understand the fact that a cell phone can interfere with all kind of electronic devices and for that reason it is not allowed to use them on board. What I don’t understand is that I am allowed to take a cell phone on board while a nail clipper or a bottle of water will be confiscated. I guess it is too expensive to set up a system to take and return all the passengers cellphones. Is it money versus safety?
What would a cell phone interfere with on a Piper Cub? I can’t imagine how RF interference could interfere with gyroscopic instruments. Maybe if you held it right beside the compass…
I never turn off my mobile phone or ask passengers to turn off their phones when flying a Cessna 172. I can’t think of any flight-critical system that could be affected by the phone (other than some minor radio interference every 15 minutes or so). The safety benefit of having it turned on in case of emergency far outweighs any possible (in my mind, non-existent) risk.
Preliminary results are that the Air France pilots did not have one wonky instrument but multiple readings on multiple instruments, in the middle of the night, in a severe storm. Very much a worst-case scenario.
Normally, having an instruments cease working or giving erroneous information just means the pilots go to a back up method of getting the information and the flight ends without anyone outside the cockpit having any clue there was something wrong.
My understanding is that the pitot tubes were blocked by ice but that other instruments continued to function. The pilots may not have realized this, and it may have appeared to them that all the instruments were malfunctioning, but in fact they were all operating properly (including the artificial horizon). The entire disaster was caused by a single failure, of a single instrument / sensor, and the crew’s subsequent mishandling of the situation due to poor training, fatigue, poor avionics design, etc. No other mechanical failures occurred.
See the latest interim report of July 29, 2011:
http://www.bea.aero/fr/enquetes/vol.af.447/note29juillet2011.en.pdf
Small hijack for those who fly often. I’m thinking about how annoying it is when people on the bus or train yammer loudly on their cell phones for the whole ride, is that also the case on a plane these days? If so they must be even louder, and more annoying.