Tris: You’re wrong, period, amen.
The TSA has a set of responsibilities under the law. Those responsibilities do NOT extend to aviation safety, only aviation security. So the fact the TSA used to prohibit nail *scissors * (they never prohibiuted nail clippers, and they do not now prohibit nail scissors) is irrelevant to any regulation or lack of same on cell phones. If there was a way to hijack or reliably crash an airplane with a cellphone, they too would likely be prohibited by TSA.
The FAA has regulatory authority over aviation safety. As the links provided by Duckster explains, the situation with cell phones (all PEDs really) is complex.
Prior to the advent of PEDs, the attitude of the FAA is that absolutely everything is prohibited until a formal testing program has proven it’s safe to umpteen decimal places. The airplane manufacturers can’t even change the brand of #10-32 machine screw or light bulb they use without formal engineering proof that the new ones are as good or better than the old ones.
When the first PEDs (“transistor radios”) came out in the 60s, there was a very real engineering concern because the IF stages of AM & FM radio *receivers *operated on very similar frequencies to the primary navigation system of the day, VOR. The signals inside the coax running from ground transmitters 150 miles away into external antennas then into aircraft radio receivers are measured in microvolts. That a passenger’s radio’s electronics could be situated a couple feet away from antenna cabling and be pumping out interference stronger than microvolts is very plausible. In fact it’s happened.
So radio receivers were prohibited.
Fast forward 50 years. Now we have lots of personal transmitters. And nobody in the consumer electronic business is doing anything to certify their stuff as safe for aircraft. And although the latest aircraft & avionics are built with PEDs in mind, all the old systems are still there too.
Only the 787 & A380 designs were begun after 3G cellphones became ubiquitous. Any other aircraft type (i.e. every airliner in the world today except a few dozen A380s) was designed before 3G cellphones existed. Most of them were designed before *any *cellphones existed.
Interference happens. We see it frequently. Because we can’t positively establish causation, nothing can be reported or done. The most significant inflight hazard is that the navigation system used worldwide for low-weather landings (ILS) is 1950s technology. The frequencies & signal formats are what they are. They are susceptible to PED interference. Hence the specific prohibition to turn absolutely everything off for arrival.
The FAA is in a crack. They have regulations which recognize the threat, but they shift the burden of safety onto the carriers. Why? Because they know as a matter of legal authority and practical politics that they can’t mandate the level of testing & certification required to *prove *that your personal collection of devices is safe to umpteen decimal places, or require you to leave them at home if they aren’t on the approved list.
The airlines are in a crack. They can’t practically prevent people from bringing PEDs onboard in checked luggage, carryon luggage or on their person. They don’t want to piss off their customers. They want the aiplane manufacturers to design interferance*-proof *airplanes. That’s -proof, not -resistant.
As a matter of engineering reality, the manufacturers cannot make interference-proof airplanes until they determine what they’re making them -proof from. And at the rate consumer electronics advance, thats logically impossible. A fresh aircraft design started today will be delivered in about 2020. And be in use to 2060.
If we could get worldwide regulation on the permissible nature of PED transmissions both deliberate & inadvertant, that would at least give the avioncs engineers a target to aim at. Fat chance of that.
Finally, passenger’s attitudes that this is all some scam to sell airphone use, or some bureacratic CYA are a large part of the problem. If I was King we’d treat somebody firing up a PED at a prohibited time or in a prohibited mode about the same as we treat somebody who starts playing with matches.
This is a tough problem. if I was King we’d have an effective RF interference receiver which could alert us that something unexpected is transmitting someplace aboard our aircraft. And the FAA would be running a comprehensive data gathering program to for us to report these occurrences.
In reality, everybody’s looking the other way & hoping the next generation of nav systems can be designed to be close enough to -proof that we don’t care what gizmo’s people use. And that the odds are good enough that no accident will happen in the 20+ years it will take to deprecate the existing nav systems worldwide.
I will say the odds are exellent that no accident will happen in the meantime whose investigation will blame PEDs. But there is almost certainly going to be an accident which *should *be blamed on the PED which will cause it.