Are Personal Electronics on Planes Safe?
July 20 -- A congressional subcommittee hearing about the safety of cell phones, computers and even hearing aids on airplanes has been the buzz of Capitol Hill today.
A 1996 study on how personal electronics affect airplane navigational systems came up inconclusive. But the Federal Aviation Administration has banned the devices anyway, saying they can’t take the chance.
“We submitted the proposal exactly two years ago, to the day, and we’ve been waiting by the phone ever since,” said Marshall Cross, president of Boylston-based Megawave Corp.
The Massachusetts company says they can show who’s using electronic devices without permission, but that the FAA won’t ante up the $750,000 to build the gadgetry to find out.
Experts on the issue, however, believe that there is no hard proof that cell phones and other electronic devices pose safety risks on an aircraft, but bans on their use should continue as a precautionary measure, experts told Congress today.
“We are preventing the extremely remote event,” the Federal Aviation Administration’s Thomas McSweeny said at a House Transportation subcommittee hearing.
Risky Radiation
Witnesses said that while there have been anecdotal incidents in which portable electronic devices may have interfered with aircraft operations, they have never been able to repeat such interference under controlled conditions.
Despite that lack of hard evidence, such interference “should be viewed as potentially hazardous and the source of an unacceptable risk to aircraft,” said David Watrous, president of RTCA Inc, an advisory group to the FAA that issued reports on electronic devices in 1963, 1988 and 1996.
An airline industry-run advisory organization called the RTCA released a report in 1996 saying that the risk of portable electronics interfering with navigational systems “is low at this time,” but that the devices were “potentially hazardous and an unacceptable risk” during takeoff and landing.
Related Stories
ABC News Live