Cell Phones on Airplanes Dangerous? We Don't Know
March 3, 2006 -- -- Boiled down to its essence, the ongoing debate about whether cell phones and other personal electronic devices could ever pose a true risk to the safety of an airline flight by messing with the cockpit displays comes down to this: We still don't know.
Yes, a new study just published validates that airline cabins are full of radio energy emitted by cell phones, DVD players and portable GPS devices, but we already knew this.
While the recommendations of a research team at Carnegie Mellon University are largely right (we need more research and more money for the NASA reporting system in aviation; and we need to harmonize airborne emission standards and get the FAA and FCC to cooperate), there is still no definitive evidence that the electronic gadgets we can use in flight (though are not necessarily permitted to) can pose problems.
But here's the bottom line: People will cheat. Always.
They will make clandestine phone calls on the landing approach or run devices the flight attendants told them to shut off when the plane is cruising below 10,000 feet. Depend on it. In other words, if flight safety depends on compliance in the cabin with directives to turn off or not use certain devices, then we're already operating in an unsafe system, which I do not believe is the case.
When and if we ever do discover and validate that there is a true, no-foolin' potential for in-cabin passenger electronics to bobble or interfere with flight deck instruments, we have only two choices: completely ban devices like cell phones, DVD players, GPS units, radios -- or whatever items are found to be particularly dangerous, or beef up the invulnerability of the instruments in the cockpit so that radio interference is impossible.
The latter is the only rational solution, and achieving the status of an interference-free cockpit is already a known art.
The U.S. military has had decades of experience in "hardening" cockpit electronics so that powerful radio emissions from, for example, shipborne radars or enemy transmitters can't penetrate it.
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