Letters to the Editor
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I don't mind the chattering
I want a "no screamin' babies" section. I appreciated the description of why the pilots request what they do. Patrick, would it make sense to put books and other large, hard objects away during takeoff and landing, too? Granted, most people read puffy paperback romances, but I'd hate to be bonked in the head by one of the weightier Harry Potter volumes being held by the juvenile (or 45 year old housewife) in the seat behind me.
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it's all about cost
The public demands such a high standard of safety from air travel that its not surprising cell phones have been prohibited. It's very expensive to prove cell phones are safe on aircraft and with no offsetting revenue for this expense the carriers understandably haven't been interested especially because a lot travelers are not going to happy with the person next to them chattering for hours.
I hope the pico cells run into technical difficulties and do not show up for years. I'm much happier in a no chattering cabin.
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It is most certainly a safety matter...
It's a safety matter for the deserving dipshits who will be beaten to death with their phones by their fellow passengers. As if the air marshalls don't have enough to worry about without letting every ego in a suit irritate the passengers around him with loud and prolonged discussions of his various business dealings for several hours on end. If only Dante had had the foresight to invent an 8th circle of hell featuring 400 people trapped in a tin can thousands of feet above the earth yelling their one end of a telephone conversation over everyone else.
If the airlines have made up this party-line about cell phones being dangerous to flight [and I don't doubt it], God bless them for it. The day the idiot next to me can spend the 7 hours to Europe on the phone is the day I start seriously considering ocean travel.
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The lack of use of Airfones
should clue everybody in that people do not NEED to spend a whole plane flight gabbing into their cell. Like Patrick, I have never seen anybody use one, and if so many people had so many calls to make that were absolutely vital, it should happen at least once in a while. If it's ever allowed, people will use their cell phones on planes because they can, not because they need to. As it stands, people aren't arm-wrestling each other to pay $4 a minute for phoning home, and they seem to be just fine telling themselves "It can wait until we land". Words to live by...
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Nooooooo.
Oh god, please please god no cell phones during flight. Just imagine the carnage.
I would, however, very much like to see a power outlet at every seat (inside front of the left arm rest, ideally) and -- oh, it makes me swoon just to think of it -- wifi. And bandwidth galore, please. I might need to download a movie from iTunes so I don't have to watch your stupid [badly cut] version of the latest Jim Carrey schmaltz-fest. Just be sure to block Vonage and the like.
Please, airlines - your food is gross and your "entertainment" options are akin to...well, I'd almost rather listen to the colic-ridden infant two rows back who's shrieking like somebody set his damn diaper on fire. Anyway, you fail. I'll bring my own food and something to amuse myself. Just give me a decent travel environment at a reasonable price, and leave off trying to create some kind of hotel-like experience in coach. The end result is invariably like being trapped in an extra-shabby Howard Johnson's next to a family with toddlers on a Twinkie-induced freakout.
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Lord help us
Is airline travel not enough of a hellish experience already? If we add idiots with their incessant cell phone drivel to the mix, I might blow.
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iPod Restrictions?
An interesting comment about restrictions on iPods (and other headphones) - it's just so you can hear instructions? Why are flight attendants so snippy about it, then? I've had a flight attendant literally grab me, rip the headphones out of my ears and scream at me for using my iPod before the "official announcement" - even though we'd been in the air for 20 minutes and were flying comfortably - but because the "fasten seat belt sign" hadn't been turned off yet, I was "endangering the plane".
(Agree with you totally on the cell phones, though.)
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It doesn't seem like such a big deal to me.
This is what I know from four years/1500 flight hours as a pilot in the Learjet 60, 2001-2005, a bizjet with modern electronic flight monitoring and navigation equipment (EFIS), in addition to electronically controlled engine (FADEC) technology:
1. The only effect of cell phone usage in the cockpit is an occasional irritating noise heard in the overhead speaker or headphones.
2. Cell phones are virtually useless more 10,000 feet above the surface. At the cruising altitudes I frequented, between 37,000 and 43,000 feet--only a little higher, perhaps, than the typical airliner, on average--only once or twice did I have a signal strong enough (while holding the phone to the window) to actually make a connection. So, as for the worry of passengers being able to yack nonstop across the continent, unless the handset and base station technology changes substantially, there's nothing to be concerned about. In other words, you're better off turning the thing off so as to save the battery.
And of course, your results may vary.
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cellphones emit intense bursts of power
people don't realize how powerful the RF emissions of cell phone are. these things emit huge amounts of RF energy.
it is entirely plausible that they can interfere with airplane comms.
of course, as patrick states, airplanes are designed to deal with noise and interference.
but still, makes sense to turn off cell phones.
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Yes, cell phones and laptops are dangerous to flight.
I am an Electrical Engineer and have a subscription to Spectrum, the journal of IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). This journal published a research paper in March 2006 entitled "Unsafe At Any Airspeed" on this very topic, and they actually measured the interferance to the plane's control systems caused by cell phones and laptops during actual flights. I will provide a link to the article, along with some selected quotes:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/mar06/3069
"What we found was disturbing....our research has found that these items can interrupt the normal operation of key cockpit instruments, especially Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers, which are increasingly vital to safe landings. Two different studies by NASA further support the idea that passengers' electronic devices dangerously produce interference in a way that reduces the safety margins for critical avionics systems."
"More important, the data support a conclusion that continued use of portable RF-emitting devices such as cellphones will, in all likelihood, someday cause an accident by interfering with critical cockpit instruments such as GPS receivers. This much is certain: there exists a greater potential for problems than was previously believed."
"Our data and the NASA studies suggest to us that there is a clear and present danger: cellphones can render GPS instrument useless for landings. "