How To Destroy An Airplane — Part II

Sev­er­al months ago, I wrote a post about the use of cell phones on air­planes. I (rather smug­ly) con­clud­ed that there was no chance a cell phone would be able to inter­fere with the nav­i­ga­tion sys­tems on air­planes and there­fore the FAA was just being a bunch of worry-warts.

Well, it turns out I was very wrong. In the past week, I lis­tened to a Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can pod­cast (episode 5) inter­view with com­put­er engi­neer M. Granger Mor­gan about an arti­cle in this mon­th’s IEEE Spec­trum con­cern­ing some research into cell phones on planes (Unsafe at Any Air­speed). The con­clu­sion: not only can cell phones inter­fere with flight com­mu­ni­ca­tion and nav­i­ga­tion sys­tems, all sorts of elec­tron­ics from DVD play­ers to mp3 play­ers can as well!

This week’s episode of Myth­busters (episode 49) also tried to tack­le the idea of cell phones on planes. Their results weren’t con­clu­sive, to say the least, but did also indi­cate that cell phones have the poten­tial for interference.

Appar­ent­ly, it isn’t a com­mon phe­nom­e­non, but the FAA has a num­ber of logs of inter­fer­ence. What was the final rec­om­men­da­tion of the authors of the Spec­trum arti­cle? The FCC and the FAA need to talk a lit­tle bit more about how to ensure that future devices won’t cause prob­lems or that any poten­tial prob­lems from cur­rent devices can be brought to safe levels.

I still say planes aren’t going to be drop­ping out of the sky any­time soon. How­ev­er, you may get a nasty mes­sage from the Cap­tain that his instru­ments aren’t mak­ing any sense and to get off of the damn phone.