The Use of Approved Electronic Devices Is Not Approved

I don't seriously think there is any danger of interference *any more*, but there probably used to be. I remember back sometime in the mid-1970s, my mother bought our first electronic calculator. We soon discovered that if the TV was on and you had the calculator within about 20 feet of it, the TV would make amusing "beep" and "bloop" noises as the buttons were pressed. It wasn't as bad of a TV jammer as Dad's electric razor (boy, did *that* thing throw out the interference!), but it certainly would have been distracting if you were a pilot talking on the radio while trying to fly a plane.

I expect that there were some problems with interference with the aircraft radio back in the 70s, and the regulations never got changed. And now it's just another bit of petty tyranny.

The fear of disturbing the plane's navigation systems is why certain devices like two-way radios can never be used aboard the aircraft even during cruise phase. The prohibition on all devices during takeoff and landing is more a just-in-case: they want you to be able to hear them when they tell you to evacuate the aircraft.

It seems they are loosening the cruise phase restrictions: some airlines are installing on-board wi-fi, and there has been talk of (FSM forbid) doing away with the restrictions on using cell phones in flight.

For cell phones specifically there's the opposite issue of a phone on the plane having free sight to many, many cell towers below the airplane. While it won't be able to do two-way communication, it'll still be able to claim a slot in each of those towers channels. With not one, but a hundred or more phones in a single aircraft, and with multiple aircraft in the area, people can inadvertently execute a distributed denial of service-attack on the ground below.

I think the real reason, at least now, is that in case of an incident of some sort, where the flight attendants need to communicate with everyone quickly, it would be very bad if someone was jamming along to an iPod, or had a laptop on their lap and couldn't get out quickly, or whatever.

While I must say that your caving in to fear of the upcoming snow disappoints my Syracuse roots, its definitely snowing here at 11 am.

But you're not alone, the government is sending people home 4 hours early so yeah, they're surrendering to mother nature too :p

The flight crew like their jobs, and the rules say they need passengers to put away all electronic devices. Therefore, they enforce the rules not because they enjoy it, but because it is a condition of their employment.

As someone who was the petty ID-and-bag-checker at a college library as an undergrad, I have a lot of sympathy for the flight crew on this one. It didn't matter if I had classes with you and knew which dorm you lived in - if you didn't have your ID, my supervisor would write me up if they saw me let you in, and they regularly let student employees go.

Now if you ask why the airline industry requires you to put away and store the devices - that's a different question, and seems to be mostly rear-end-covering with a smattering of potential electronic noise in case of device malfunction, which has the potential to interfere with tower/pilot communication. At least that's the story they're sticking to.

Cellphones and Bluetooth radios might interfere with cockpit radios; I can tell sometimes at work when someone hasn't turned their cellphone off from the odd buzzing and clicking I hear on the line, and I'm listening over a landline.

iPods and the like, well, no... I don't see them interfering with instruments or radios. I do, however, see them leading to people not hearing the PA and then missing important announcements in cases of emergency. I suspect that's the cause of getting folks to put down the earphones during takeoffs and landings, which are the parts of a flight most likely to have an incident.

-- Steve

There's a lot of variation from airline to airline inhow strict they are about this stupid rule. Southwest seems to be notably lax about it-- they've made the announcement on both of my recent trips with them, but haven't actually insisted that I turn off the iPod. Which was nice, because on some of those flights, I was asleep until the wheels touched down, and would not have appreciated being woken up and made to turn off my music for the last fifteen minutes of the flight.

I think you can tell how weak the connection between safety and these rules is from the fact that you are officially not allowed to listen to an iPod during the boarding process, but can yak on your cell phone until they close the doors. This is directly related to the fact that wealthy businessmen who fly a lot are constantly on the phone but do not generally listen to music on planes.

I *KNOW* IT'S BECAUSE . . . ahem . . . because your cell phone will make the fuel going into the airplane EXPLODE!!! I know that because that's what it says on the sign at the gas station. Anyone who thinks otherwise IS A CELLPHONE DENIALIST!!!!

Bear in mind, folks, not only do the devices in question need to generate some measureable level of interference (which most devices don't, since spectrum si pretty regulated, these days) they would have to generate interference in the same band as the aircraft comm and navigation devices. While not impossible, this is a less likely scenario than just, "It'll interfere." I always want to ask exactly what bands they're using, but today that'll probably get me thrown off the plane and strip-searched.

I haven't looked it up, but I kinda tend to doubt that the airline industry picked the same badn as cell phone towers to put their own navigational beacons in.

As to why the crews do what they do, its explicable by a perfectly ordinary extrapolation of paranoia and ignorance: The flight crew doesn't know a cell phone from a laptop from an iPod from a gameboy, and even if they are perfectly up on all those things today, tomorrow will bring yet another class of gadgets. So, in proper form, anything that has wires or emits light or sound is forbidden.

So if I take an old pair of headphones, cut the jack off, and tape it to my headphone cord...can I hide the ipod and wave the loose jack at the attendant and say "Its off, I just left my headphones in to keep the noise down"?

i hate it when they ask me to turn off my tesla coil during flights.

they always say "it's too loud!" or "i can't stand the smell of ozone!" or "it wrecked the fly by wire controls, emp'd the comms, fried the nav devices, punched a hole through the fuselage and ignited the starboard wing fuel tank. we're all gonna die! we're all gonna die!!!!"

bunch of whiners.

They are worried you won't hear their orders to evacuate the aircraft because you were listening to "It's a Small World" at ear-bleeding volume.

My favorite pre-flight was when a steward said "Parents traveling with children should put on their own oxygen mask first. You can then put one on your child if they have been behaving themselves."

The FAA requires airlines to prohibit all electronic devices except those they have determined will cause no interference to any avionics equipment. It's up to each individual airline to make all determinations, there is no master list. Lazy airlines prohibit all sorts of devices, enlightened ones who care about their customers allow almost all devices. The prohibition against using devices during takeoff and landing is an FAA regulation, and there is nothing any airline can do about it. It's purely a bureaucratic matter, and has nothing to do with actual safety, just the fear of FAA bureaucrats of being criticized for making changes.

I always heard it was because they wanted passengers paying attention during take off and landing. It's the same reason they won't let me sleep below 10,000 feet or whatever.

Of course, on the planes I fly in now, they are only concerned with radios in devices like phones, Wifi and Bluetooth units. Since there is no separate cockpit, you can tell how important it is to have all the instruments working right on a cloudy day. You can't see any farther into the fluff than the pilot. As for jamming the cell phone towers down below, well, there aren't all that many out where I fly. The coverage is pretty awful.

I always heard it was because they wanted passengers paying attention during take off and landing. It's the same reason they won't let me sleep below 10,000 feet or whatever.

See, I've never encountered that. I've never seen them wake anybody up except for making them put their seat back up, or turn off a music player. This is one of the reasons the music thing annoys me so much-- on several occasions I've had flight attendants shake me awake to turn off the iPod, but let other sleeping passengers sleep in peace.

I wrote about this a while back. Someone wrote a paper on the issue of electronics on planes and noted that about 1 in every 300 incidents was likely to be EMI related.

Cell phones won't work in the air anyways. They're not designed to cope with 800 km/h. Also note, your cell phone is unlikely to work on the 2-300 km/h trains used in Europe and Japan.

(Why: they can't deal with the doppler effect and other timing issues of moving that quickly.)