No. During takeoff and landing cell phones and all other electronic devices have to be turned off, and when I took a flight last week they were quite strict about enforcing it. Once you are in the air, you can use cell phones in “airplane mode” which means you can play games on them and listen to music, etc. but you can’t use them to talk and the transmitter is basically shut off.
As soon as you land and they allow the use of cell phones people start gabbing, but on the flights I was on, no one was obnoxious about it.
Actually, the pitot tubes are also connected to things like the vertical speed indicator as well.
It wasn’t that the instruments “ceased to function” but that they were giving readings that were erroneous. If they simply gave no reading at all that would actually simplify things. The cockpit recordings and actions indicate (to me, at least) that they did, in fact, know there was something wrong with the airspeed indications.
Another problem is that the airspeed indicator is pretty damn important - having a functional artificial horizon is useless if you aren’t moving forward fast enough to stay in the air. Without reliable airspeed indication, maintaining flying speed does become more difficult. Seeing as they stalled the airplane they clearly did not maintain flying speed, and that is what killed everybody.
Normally, if one of the three of a set of instruments gives a reading different than the other two an Airbus will ignore the anomalous reading and rely on the other two instruments. Unfortunately, with the airplane in question, all three pitot tubes/airspeed indicators seemed to be giving different speeds, at which point the airplane relies on the humans to sort it out. Unfortunately, at night in a bad storm is not the best place to be doing that.
The thing the FAA is really worried about is that because they have fiercely clung to this bizzare belief for so long now with absolutey not one single instance of even remotely likely interference with any operation of any airplane anywhere, admitting that now would be somewhat harmful to the reputation of the Agency as something other than a bunch of freakin’ idiots.
Have you ever heard interference from a cell phone through your computer speakers? Some cell phones do this more than others - GSM phones particularly. Sometimes it can be quite loud.
It is perfectly possible for this interference to disrupt digital signals in the aircraft, especially if those signals are already operating near their maximum noise tolerance (due to age, shielding damage, other interference, other malfunctions, etc.) Also, older cell phones and malfunctioning cell phones may transmit erroneously at much higher power, and cause more interference than your average iPhone. There’s no practical way for airlines to inspect people’s devices for overpowered transmitters, or other defects.
In most cases, the use of cell phones will cause no problems. The fact that most airplanes surely have some nitwit who doesn’t listen to the announcement is proof of that. However, aviation safety is all about the abnormal cases. If the airplane has already experienced one systems malfunction due to a mechanical problem, then an additional systems failure caused some old relic piece of shit cell phone with a malfunctioning transmitter will make things that much worse, and that much harder for the pilot to figure out.
The fact that no such accident has happened yet is meaningless. The (commercial) aviation safety infrastructure is so good that the defining characteristic of most crashes is a novel, previously-unseen combination of circumstances that training/design was not intended to handle, or a circumstance previously considered too rare to worry about (the Airbus A320 that Sullenberger landed in the Hudson did not even have an official procedure for double engine failure).
I don’t want to get into a debate with Broomstick, but my reading of the reports indicates that the sole failure of the airspeed indicators - and nothing else, not even the VSI - was enough to confuse the pilots into hand-flying the airplane straight into the Atlantic. Regardless of how well pilots can be trained, they are not perfect, and are just as vulnerable to panic, confusion, and other mental factors as anyone else. Banning the use of electronic devices at takeoff, and the use of transmitting devices at altitude, is a simple way to minimize the risk of failure.
How much is the reduction in risk? Quite minimal, I admit. But I don’t see why I should accept any increased risk while flying so that the dipshit in the aisle next to me can call his mistress from 35,000 feet, or whatever.
If it was minimal, but extant actual risk, at least one case of one unexpected reading on one instrument on one plane in one place would have been traced to the use of a cellphone. Yet that has never been reported anywhere.
If poltergeists were to jump up in the face of a pilot during take off, that too could have devastating consequences. What procedures do you recommend to avert this admittedly quite minimal risk?
This a bureaurocrats covering their asses because no bureaurocrats ever issue orders to stop worrying about things, or taking precautions. No one gets fired for not changing a policy, so that is the default.
I assume it’s actually not the speakers, which were quite expensive, but the cheap Radioshack cable connecting them to my computer.
And aircraft certainly do have shielding, although the amount of shielding used must be balanced with the need to conserve space and minimize the aircraft’s weight. In any case, shielding can be compromised in any number of ways. As someone posted upthread, a brand-new glass cockpit display was shown to be sensitive to WiFi emissions during certification testing. It’s lucky that this sensitivity was severe enough that it turned up in testing, and wasn’t something more subtle that became apparent only on certain statistically-outlying units when used in commercial flights.
Aviation safety is all about not taking unnecessary risks. There is very little margin for error when you’re thousands of feet above the ground, moving at hundreds of miles per hour, sometimes depending solely on your instruments that you may be in the process of troubleshooting to tell you basic information about the airplane (like whether the plane is flying straight and level, or in a descending spiral).
In all other modes of transportation, there is always the option to slam on the brakes and fix the problem once you’ve come to a stop, and you usually have the benefit of being able to look out the window to make sure that you’re not heading for a bridge abutment or something in the meantime.
Airplane avionics are already ridiculously expensive because of the comprehensive certification process they must go through. It is perfectly reasonable to just tell the passengers to shut their phones off and depend on the flight attendants and nosy seatmates to catch 95% of the miscreants, rather than require avionics manufacturers to test their system for the case of “All 300 passengers using their cell phone at once, as permitted by law,”, and ensure that their equipment continues to operate properly even when this case is combined with the current worst-case adverse condition required by certification.
In short: aviation safety is all about maintaining a safety margin. Allowing the use of passenger-operated transmitting devices (i.e. cell phones) in flight reduces that safety margin for very little practical gain.
Incidentally - even passive receiving devices are banned in flight because the receiver circuitry often operates at the same frequency as the transmitter, is necessarily not fully shielded (otherwise it would be unable to receive), and can therefore produce EM emissions as well. That’s why you’re not allowed to operate a police scanner on an airplane.
So, this currently-banned activity should be allowed because the banned activity has not yet caused a crash? Flawless logic, there.
Because a crash is essentially the only conceivable way causation could be shown in a commercial aircraft. When was the last time you went on a commercial flight, and after landing the pilot announced “Sorry folks, we had a temporary glitch with the avionics during the flight today. We handled it just fine, but we’re going to have to confiscate all your cell phones and send them to Washington so the NTSB can determine if they were operating during flight and can be proven to have caused it.”
Yet in the face of this clear and present danger, the TSA, notably ultra concerned with the possibility that someone somewhere might ever interfere with a commercial flight have, by the example of their own policy, made clear that cell phones represent less potential risk to air traffic than Nail Clippers, which are not even allowed to be on the plane, except in checked baggage.
I cannot imagine what would possess anyone to defend this absurdity. Do you have a vested interest in the FAA? Are you a government policy authority? Admit it. It’s bone stupid, always has been, and was put in place by a moron, ratified by a group of lickspitle yes men, and no one wants to admit it.
And as much as I am astounded to find myself defending FAA bureaucrats, they are in a lose-lose situation here.
If they keep the ban in place because it’s the safe thing to do, people take their uninformed anecdotes, assumptions and proclamations and accuse them of being overly cautious.
If they decide to allow cell phones and an accident is eventually proven to be caused by one, you can bet some of the very same people will be all over them, criticizing them just as harshly for not doing their duty to protect the flying public.
I mean, hell, imagine the circus that would result if the ban was lifted, and an airliner crashed the next week? Though it would surely be the result of some unrelated factor, it would take months, perhaps years before that could be proven, and the resulting PR nightmare would cripple the FAA and prevent actual useful work from being done.
If a Republican president were in office, morons on this board would be criticizing the FAA for being in bed with big business, compromising safety for commercial reasons, and ascribe some financial motive to the rule change (e.g. increased revenue for the cell phone companies, increased revenue from business customers by the airlines, who knows). If a Democrat were in office, a separate set of people (still morons, though) would be criticizing the FAA for being incompetent, poorly-run, improperly managed and blame the administration and existence of regulations in the first place for allowing this disaster to take place.
Actually, I suspect that these groups of people are so unencumbered by logic that they would make these points regardless, as they do for any negative event of any type.
What exactly are you calling “interference” in this case? Because cell phones have caused at least one instance of the plane completely being unable to speak to the controllers that I am aware of (and this isn’t something I follow so there easily could be more) and has caused numerous instances of noise in pilot’s headsets, which is not exactly something that will make the plane immediately fall out of the sky but certainly seems like enough justification to me to continue the ban on transmitting devices during takeoff and landing.
And the FCC and FAA aren’t just blindly clinging to some old story so that they’ll look good (that part seems like conspiracy woo to me). They re-evaluated all of this a few years ago, taking into consideration changes in technology and aircraft, and after a rather thorough study they decided to keep the bans in place.
(For the record I work in industrial control, and have absolutely no ties to the FAA, FCC, the airlines, or anyone else involved in this)
Now your argument depends on the TSA being logical, rational and consistent. Another winner.
The reason I’m wasting my time writing these posts is because I’m an engineer and I analyze and design complex systems for a living, which sometimes involves failure analysis. Professionally, nothing annoys me more than people who think that, because something is simple in their simplistic view of the situation, it should be simple in reality.
Additionally, few things annoy me more than other people compromising my safety because of their uninformed opinion that it’s “not a big deal”.
I’m also a (non-commercial) pilot, and I have an interest in aviation safety (as does any sane pilot of light aircraft, which are statistically about as dangerous as motorcycles). While they can be somewhat overbearing at times, it is clear to me that the only reason commercial aviation (i.e. airline travel) is as safe as it is is the hard work, dedication and ability of the very people in industry and government that you are so ignorantly insulting.
I’ll be a little more overt than I was in previous posts. I work for a company that writes electromagnetic simulation software. We have had numerous projects related to the safety of cell phones on airliners (including researching the placement of a cell tower antenna onboard to mitigate the OTHER problem with cell phones on aircraft–that is, over-stressing the ground-based towers with cellphones moving too rapidly or seeing multiple towers simultaneously.)
The cumulative signal strength and interference potential from a few cell phones is minimal, but the potential from a significant fraction of the people aboard using them or even leaving them on is actually quite astounding and a lot larger than you’d expect–I mean, consider they’re all operating in a moderately shielded electromagnetically reflective metal tube, for starters.
I decline to be more specific, as I enjoy being employed.
If electromagnetic interference from cell phones can, indeed, disrupt aircraft instruments, why haven’t any terrorists used them?
Nobody move! I’ve got a phone, and I’m NOT AFRAID TO USE IT!!
But seriously, a terrorist could probably rig up some kind of dedicated jamming device disguised as an innocuous device and simply stuff it in his carry-on luggage. What defense would a pilot have against such a scenario?
No, seriously, while instrument failure is no joke one of the reasons the human is sitting up front is to deal with failures of that sort. Airliners with complete power or massive instruments failures have landed safely due to the timely actions of the pilot(s) involved. Such a jamming device is a way to cause great inconvenience and stress but it is in no way a reliable means to crash an airplane.
