If aircraft navigational equipment was fucked by a few milliwatts from a handheld phone how would a plane survive flying into range of all the RF shit round a major city.

Some people are just thick and gullible!

It’s just that tossers that drive planes rank right up there with firemen in all the polls!

Still it’s nice to see that those wonderful pilot folks that we all trust so much in every poll taken can still have a wank over pissing off the stupidly self-important phone waving nobodies!!

R3 is of course very right.

Where there has been loosening of the regulations it has been under quite strict conditions. iPad and Tablet use is becoming more and more frequent on flight decks. The whole reason flying in general is as immensely safe as it is today is because of the regulations and everyone working within a system. There are numerous examples of insufficient regulations and oversight that have lead to accidents, like Lockhart River in Queensland and a spate of accidents in Canada prior to 2011. Where I work presently death is an all too frequent occurrence and so much of that death has come down to poor regulatory oversight and regulatory non-compliance.

The Air NZ link pilot would have been able to tell a phone was transmitting due to the interference that can be heard over the RT headsets. Sometimes it can be so bad you can’t actually hear radio transmissions.

It would be exceptionally sad if the dit-dit-dit-dits of a cell phone interrupted an important Air Traffic Control instruction and lead to an accident.

Please – leave the phones off, or have a “phone free section” that coincides with the nice and more roomier seats up the front.

the wiring in planes is deliberately lower tech and thus rather robust – even the modern planes have miles of wiring done in a manner that your local electrician would understand.

As the signal drops by the square of the distance from the device and the signal is relatively weak then perhaps if one held the phone next to the device it might interfere. Have you even noticed that the old beep, beep, beep from speakers no longer occur – speakers are by definition one of the more sensitive electronic devices around.

I co-incidentally worked on a computing project with a visiting professor who worked on the likes of the computing and electronics on Boeing planes. We got in to a conversation on this very same matter over a beer as I was curious as I fly a lot, have a degree in physics, work in computing and thought the ban was total nonsense. He entirely agreed – if there was the slightest chance that an accidentally left on mobile device or devices could bring down or even interfere with a plane then the airlines would be seen as completely culpable as it is an entirely predictable occurrence. They have done many tests and never seen anything to date. They would use detection devices as it is reasonably easy to see whether a device is emitting EMR with a $500 detector.

The average plane takes off and lands with several devices still on and strangely enough does not fall from the sky. This is utter and complete rubbish with no scientific basis.

Zero megawtts on that one. The phones are hard wired in (not wireless), and they have to pass a strict electrical compatibility safety test before theyre allowed in the plane anyway, like all other electrical equipment.

“smoking always was a hazard but it was too prevalent so it was tolerated.
A bit like toasters… exposed mains potential metal with a wide opening, not too many other appliances are allowed to do that.”

I’ve never heard of a plane crashing or similar due to a passenger smoking…
Never tried taking a toaster on board a plane…
Planes i’ve been on recently have a phone built into every passenger seat, are these safer? What if all 300 pax tried to phone at the same time on one of the seat installed phones – how many megawatts would that be outputting?

Also, FYI, they don’t turn down the lights on takeoff and landings to save power either – it’s so that if there is an emergency you don’t take vital seconds to adjust to sudden darkness.

Anything with electronics gives off electromagnetic radiation (EMR) and the levels can be quite high. In the early days of gameboys and the like there were several documeted cases of these devices casuing problems for navigational equipment on aircraft. Through appropriate design of both the device itself and the aircraft’s internal cabling (which acts like a big antenna) the risks can be minimised. However they cannot be reduced to zero.

The bigger risk is transmitting devices like cellphones, handheld radios and ipads which deliberately pump out high levels if EMR in order to connect to a network. When you’re in the sky youre a long way from the cellsites so the phone pumps out EMR at max power. At the same time the navaids that guide the arcraft have a relatively weak incoming signal strength so the cellphones create a risk of interference – especially when you may have a couple of hundred of them all turned on at once. I’ve read case studies where a single handheld radio has caused autopilots to disengage and interfere with other controls.

Air NZ’s airbuses allow calling etc becasue they have a localised micro site in the plane which allows the phones to operate at a very low level of power, greatly reducing the risk of interference.

It may be the case that both modern phones and modern aircraft are designed well enough that the risk is sufficiently low, and a rule change is possible. But it is not correct to say there is no technical reason.

Speaking for myself, having all these devices turned off for the critical phases iof flight (take-off and landing) is entirely appropriate.

I like the idea of phones being banned (would be great fun sitting beside one of those people who feel they have to shout at the phone), but not being able to read a Kindle during takeoff is stupid.

I remember when the Air NZ A320 crashed in France, and everyone on here had figured out that there was “obviously” something completely wrong with these new-fangled computerized aircraft. It was quite funny…

I find it little short of miraculous that so many heavy aircraft make so many successful landings every day…

Cat III autoland.