Cell phones are no danger to airliners ...
I'm Mike Fitzsimmons with commentary on 920 - KXLY
On a flight from Austin to Dallas this week, a 50 year old man refused to stop talking on his cell phone after repeated requests by Southwest Airlines flight attendants. The man had received a message that his father's heart had stopped beating. He was trying to reach doctors at a cardiac unit where his father had been taken. The man now faces a class "C" misdemeanor charge for disorderly conduct on board an aircraft.
Federal Aviation Administration regulations prohibit use of a cell phone except when an aircraft is on the ground. Southwest Airlines says this is a safety regulation they are required to enforce. The airline considered the passenger's refusal so egregious that the pilot actually called ahead to have authorities meet the flight and arrest the offender when the plane landed in Dallas.
The FAA and the airline industry have prolonged and maintained the laughable myth that cell phones pose a danger to flight controls. There isn't a lick of evidence that cell phone interfere with avionics or flight controls. It's a fabrication, and the industry knows it. Remember those pay telephones that were mounted on seat backs on commercial airliners? They were cell phones, and the only difference between those and yours is that the airline realized revenue from those "approved" mobile phones, and they wouldn't get a dime, if you used your own in flight. On 9-11, many pasengers called loved ones for the last time from on board those doomed aircrafts that had been hijacked by terrorists. The calls didn't interfere with the ability to control the plane, and given the circumstances, no one would have dared to be critical of cell phone use by those passengers.
I think it's time that the FAA and the airline industry come clean about cell phones, and knock off the fibbing. That doesn't mean I favor allowing the unrestricted use of call phones aboard commercial flights. The noise would be a tremendous nuisance. Still, in the case of an emergency, I think air passengers should be free to make or receive cell phone calls anytime.
With commentary on 920 - KXLY, I'm Mike Fitzsimmons ...
Comments
Speaking as a tech geek:
Your average cell phone talks to one tower at a time being that you move relatively slowly on the ground.
Airliners in flight on the other hand move at speeds roughly around 500 mph and at around 30,000 feet in elevation, which can put your phone in touch with hundreds of towers in the matter of seconds.
The cell phone tower infrastructure in this country is not designed to handle this kind of traffic and will end up overwhelming communications for both land based and in-flight users.
Take a good look at what happens to cell phone service during a major emergency for example when you have thousands of calls trying to be routed through the towers. The same would be happening if you and half the passengers nationwide had their cell phones on.
Besides, to some people - not being able to have their cell phone glued to their ear is an "emergency".
And yes, cell phone signals do interfere with modern avionics - they are a bit more sensitive than your hand-held GPS and airline pilots fly under IFR rules, A.K.A. they navigate using instruments, not by their eyes.
There was a research study just a few years ago by Carnegie Mellon, when the FAA was potentially going to allow cell phones on flights, with portable spectrum analyzers aboard flights that does show that cell phones do interfere with critical navigational equipment. Many of your phones emit emissions are in the same frequency as the GPS system.
Posted by: ALE | May 14, 2008 12:45 PM