Letters to the Editor
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I'm sooo tired of listening to you people moan and whine about what you have to 'put up with'
That's what I'm sick of listening to. I promise not to cloud up your universe with my phone if you promise to simply shut the fuck up about all the shit you can no longer tolerate. What, do you lay awake at night constructing new stupid paltry things to be completely outraged over? If walking around in the 21st century is such an abomination to you then please please pitch your fucking Yurt in the Idaho woods somewhere. Thank you.
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I'm sooo tired of listening to Nulla Sallas
Moaning and whining and threatening and saying "fuck" as though it still has some shock value rather than betraying his lack of vocabulary.
Fuck what an maroon.
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so skip over the posts then, loser
No one's put a gun to your head and forced you. You just love to chime in with your overinflated sense of persecution is all. Now go be a nice puppy and hang on a cross. Kiss noise.
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Its only my opinion, but from a practical perspective.
The previously cited Spectrum article is interesting and informative. The only statement I might take issue with is the one towards the end implying that no warning of corrupted data from a GPS receiver would be annunciated to the flight crew in the event of RF interference. As far as I know, as one who uses an IFR GPS receiver almost daily (and sometimes with a turned-on cell phone lying nearby), the unit is designed (as required by FAA, and I assume ICAO standards) to warn when its signal falls outside of acceptable parameters, and I assume this will apply to any sort of interference, not just from a loss of sufficient satellite coverage. ...Or does it? I'm not certain (so maybe I don't exactly assume this; assumptions get pilots in trouble).
In any event, a pilot does not fly any Instrument Approach Procedure, let alone a GPS IAP (all basic GPS IAPs currently fall under the rubric of the "non-precision" type) "blindly". That is, the pilot has a chart which shows how the IAP is to be flown-- which way to turn and when/where, altitudes, etc. If what the GPS receiver is directing (the pilot or flight-director/autopilot system to do) doesn't match, well, there's your first warning. The aircraft's ultimate control is in the hands of humans. When GPS-type IAPs become more precise, which seems inevitable, allowing for much closer proximity to a runway without first seeing it through the windscreen, I think it would be a smart idea to have RF detection/assessment systems installed in aircraft with high density seating, i.e., airliners to help insure against problems during the most critical portion of the an already critical phase.
And so while RF interference currently has the potential to seriously disrupt various navigation and information systems/devices (not really the "flight controls", unless we're talking 100 percent "fly-by-wire" aircraft, an area I know nothing about, but I think it's safe to assume that hard-wired flight control systems are well shielded and redundant)--and I agree with the basic premise that cellphones, etc. should be mandated off during critical phases--there's little, if any, reason to be hysterical about the issue. As for the less-critical phase, cruise, good luck getting and maintaining a reliable signal on an airliner at those altitudes, while surrounded by a lot of aluminum, etc., especially when seated away from a window. Leave it off, save the battery.
In regards to a letter writer's concern with that ever so annoying eee-eee-eee noise interfering with important voice communications, it seems, for me at least, in a small twin turboprop airplane cockpit, to only be a problem when the phone is within inches of a speaker or speaker/headphone wire, and even then, voice transmissions are still clear enough to be understood, in my experience thus far.
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so skip over the posts then, loser
so skip over (my) posts then, loser
farting noise
Fuck Fuck Fuck
Fuck
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Patrick Smith asks, "Is my cellphone really hazardous to flight?"
Yes, if you call the pilot.
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Why Can You Even Carry a Cellphone Onto a Plane?
IF a cellphone MIGHT send a signal which could confuse an autopilot, and out of 140 passengers ONE fails to turn off their phone as ordered by the crew (ever been in a movie theatre?) and this is the phone that sends the signal that does the dirty deed -- WHY do they even allow them to be carried onto the planes? Do you want your life to depend on the intelligence and cooperativity of the other 139 passengers? If airline safety is really an issue, people cannot be trusted to turn off their devices, and nobody believes they are really a threat or they would surely be banned like knives and explosives.
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There is a solution for the etiquette problem.
On trains in Japan, talking on a cell phone is against the rules. Each train car has a sign telling you to put your cell in "manner mode" (turn the ringer off) and refrain from making or receiving calls. (If you think a packed plane full of people talking on phones would be bad, think of a Tokyo subway car at rush hour full of people talking on phones.) So what do people do instead? They text message. It is an alternative to talking that is completely inoffensive to those around you, and built into every cell phone made since cell phones got big.
If it turns out cell phone signals are harmless to a plane's operation, it might be a good path to allow text messaging and other silent functions of a cell phone and disallow talking. The older generations might balk, but trainloads of Japanese salarymen seem to have adapted to it well enough. Of course, the Japanese do both the following-rules and being-considerate-of-those-around-you thing much better than Americans...
What are the cell phone regulations on foreign airlines, for that matter?