Mobile phone use on airplanes, how dangerous is it?

[Gonsalviz]

It's not. At a chance of may 1,000,000 to 1 odds maybe you could possible cause a small quirk in the electronics with no real consequence. The real danger is pissing off the other passengers.

[masuk]

Any attempts to allow mobile phone use has resulted in massive complaints from the general public not about the danger to airplane electronics but about the social engineering aspects of allowing a plane load of people to disturb their fellow passengers with hours of mindless chatter.

Most people refuse to be captives of other peoples drivel, especially in an environment where there is no escape

You're exactly right there. Just imagine being seated next to a gas bag on a five-hour flight.

I was once stuck in the Singapore ferris wheel, with a Chinese-speaking guy with acute verbal diarrhea. He no sooner finished one call, and he dialed up someone else.

This went on for the entire trip, and when I staggered out, I berated the security guard who checked us out before boarding, and told him he should not allow phones on the thing! I was less than happy.

In Queensland, and no doubt other places, the urban trains all have about 50% 'quiet' carriages where electrical noise makers are not permitted.

[josephbloggs]

If there was even a slight risk of dangerous interference from mobiles they would take them off people as they board and return them upon disembarking. On any plane with 200 - 500 passengers there will always be a few devices left on, that's for sure - deliberately or accidentally. If there was any risk in this they wouldn't let it happen, simple as that.

Edited May 4, 2014 by josephbloggs

[hansnl]

It is not dangerous at all.

Thousands of people leave their phones on, if only by accident, of flights every single day.

However the plane really needs to be equipped with specialized equipment, or be below 5,000 feet, for mobile technology to work.

I know the FAA/FCC are expected to approve in-flight usage quite soon in the U.S.

If you feel that your safety is being compromised you should make your concerns known to a member of the flight crew. Whinging, after the fact, on an internet forum doesn't do much good, obviously.

http://thepointsguy.com/2013/12/in-flight-phone-callstexts-roundup-which-international-airlines-allow-talking-and-texting-on-the-phone/

Not dangerous at all?

Are you mad?

Nothing more dangerous as using one of those mobile appliances on a plane.

Or a bus, or a train or whatever.

The person siting near you might become so disturbed by your thoughtles and meaningless babbling, that he will shove the mobile into your top or bottom bodily opening, deservedly.

[kamahele]

Zero danger. Just a nuisance. Pilots leave their phones on all of the time whether through error or on purpose. No crash has ever been linked to cell phone usage.

[misterphil]

You should of took his phone off him and told him he can have it back at the final destination.

Complaining about it now is closing the stable door after the horse has bolted. You put other peoples lives at risk by not stopping him, so you are both as bad as each other.

Safety rules are there for a reason.

[Shurup]

^^ In many cases for no reason actually.

[wandasloan]

On most airlines, it is still this dangerous.

[bigbamboo]

It is not dangerous at all.

Thousands of people leave their phones on, if only by accident, of flights every single day.

However the plane really needs to be equipped with specialized equipment, or be below 5,000 feet, for mobile technology to work.

I know the FAA/FCC are expected to approve in-flight usage quite soon in the U.S.

If you feel that your safety is being compromised you should make your concerns known to a member of the flight crew. Whinging, after the fact, on an internet forum doesn't do much good, obviously.

http://thepointsguy.com/2013/12/in-flight-phone-callstexts-roundup-which-international-airlines-allow-talking-and-texting-on-the-phone/

Aside from the fact it's bloody annoying to have someone yakking next to you as you are coming in to land there is usually a reason why air transport rules are in place. like keeping your seat belt loosely fastened or not inflating lifejackets inside the aircraft. Of course there are always some people around who know better.... and some who aren't.

[RBOP]

Most airlines do not allow you to use a mobile phone when the seat belt sign is "On". Enforcement is hap hazard but tend to be stricter on international flights from my observations. One time I saw stewardess tell a passenger she would take away this guys phone if he didn't turn it off. Most of the time no one seems to care about the rules. It bugs me however as rules are rules just like laws are laws and are not meant to be broken whether or not you think there is no danger. Where does one draw the line?

Edited May 5, 2014 by RBOP

[Strangebrew]

It is safe if your not the pilot that is.

[wvavin]

Please don't speculate what is going to happen when any mobile phones or electrical equipments are not switched off during take off or landing. Just remember that any breach of this simple instruction is going to compromise everybody's life onboard including you. Just remember this is enough.

[Rockhopper]

The Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, tested cell phone use in over 250 medical devices and found no interference. It's also been scientifically proven that cell phone use while pumping gas will not cause a fire or an explosion.

[thaicookingchef]

Pure bullshiiit of the airlines and stupid security rules created 30 years ago.

In each flight dozens of people keep their mobile on and this is why they ring as soon as we land.

[bangkapi]

From what I understand, this restriction of using electronics on planes came after 11 September 2001 because the powers that be didn't want people to know that once a plane reaches a certain altitude, calls can no longer be made to the ground on regular cell phones. They didn't want people questioning the official reports of all the cell phone calls between people on one of the doomed flights to people on the ground.

[trimesh]

The short answer is "not really". The first thing is that all the avionics on the plane have to meet a lot of technical rules - one of them is called DO-160, and one of the things it covers is EMC - both in terms of interference generated and susceptibility to external signals. The RF levels the equipment is exposed to in these tests is far in excess of anything that a mobile phone could generate (especially in the latest DO-160G revision, which calls for HIRF tests).

Against this, there is no real reason to allow the use of mobile phones on the plane unless there is specific on-board equipment to allow them to operate, since all the current mobile phone signalling protocols require that the MS obtains timing synchronization with the BTS and as a result there are hard limits to both the maximum range and the relative velocity between the MS and the BTS. The old analog systems (like AMPS) didn't have this restriction and could connect as long as the signal could be detected in both directions. Some TDMA phones (IS-54/IS-136 and GSM) could operate outside their supposed maximum range as long as the next time slot wasn't being used by anything else (this was heavily software dependent, though - and at least in GSM was in theory a spec violation). The pure CDMA systems (IS-95/CDMA2k, UMTS and LTE) just don't work at all unless the required timing advance is in range.

The proposals allowing mobile phone use on planes are based on placing a microcell on board the aircraft, and don't run into these limits - this also has the desirable side effect of making all the phones operate at the lowest possible transmitted power because they are so close to the base station.

[White Tiger]

Try this next time. When the person sitting next to you starts talking on their cell, start answering them as if they were talking to you. When they get annoyed just repeat, "Yep, it is very annoying isn't it?"

What you are talking about is called cell phone crashing. Here are some clips of it on Youtube taken with a hidden camera. Very funny. This first clip is at the airport but if you search Youtube for ‘cell phone crashing’ you’ll find links to this being done at football matches, disneyland, the park – all over the place.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YA1J-raGinQ

[Rorri]

lomatopo, on 04 May 2014 - 10:11, said:

QuoteThese are not silly "deductions" but have been verified by numerous passenger surveys conducted by both airlines and the FCC

Of course it's silly, you just didn't think through your (non) logic.

Feel free to post or link to these "...numerous surveys".

I think that while "Kettles" (in-frequent fliers) might be against using cell phones in flight, heck, they probably don't have one of them new fangled gadgets yet, most passenger want to be able to use their cell phones in flight, if only for data (email chat, text). (note that some airlines which currently offer WiFi on aircraft block VoIP apps.)

Conversations among passengers seated next to each other, or between a passenger and someone one the ground say by using a current in-plane sat. phone, are the same volume owing to the ambient noise. Sometimes people complain about chatty seatmates, or loudly snoring passengers, what can you do? Still not understanding how my experience is different if my seatmate is talking to his seatmate, or to someone on a phone? OK, maybe I only hear 50% of the conversation.

Net-net, I think that airlines/service providers will be charging a premium for in-flight use - given the need for additional equipment, so it may not ultimately be a huge "social engineering" issue?

I understand it is natural to fear the unknown, but maybe you should be worrying about real problems?

Why in-flight cell calls are nothing to dread

You're wrong, business travelers. If you truly value the productivity of your in-flight time, you do want the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to lift its ban against in-flight calls using mobile devices.

As you already know thanks to an orgy of (mostly) incomplete news-media coverage and (mostly) stale late-night talk-show jokes, the FCC is moving with bureaucratic alacrity to rescind its 1991 prohibition on in-flight calls. The matter could be clarified next week when a report that recommends lifting the ban is presented to FCC Commissioners.

The sentiment against in-flight calling has already spawned a petition at WhiteHouse.gov. The nation's flight attendants are already lighting torches and sharpening pitch forks. And even FCC chairman Tom Wheeler has acknowledged the opposition. "We understand that many passengers would prefer that voice calls not be made on airplanes. I feel that way myself," he says.

http://www.bizjournals.com/bizjournals/blog/seat2B/2013/12/case-for-fcc-mobile-devices.html?page=all

Again, addressing the OP's questions:

- there is no danger.

- if you feel your safety is being compromised inform a member of the flight crew regarding your issue(s).

I think many would complain because for some stupid reason, people seem to talk louder than normal, you come across as a self opinionated so and so and probably one of those loud mouth phone users.

[user82374298374]

And both incidents I experienced happened during takeoff and landing, still think 100% no risk?

There is zero risk. Nobody turns their phones off on airplanes - they just blank the screen. If there were a risk, airplanes would be raining from the skies.

There are two reasons that the airlines (and the FAA, in collusion with them), have tried (and failed, thankfully!) to keep this idiotic rule in place:

1. Because they think people might be distracted if there were an emergency and they had headphones on and couldn't hear instructions (simple rule - no wearing headphones during takeoff/landing would address this).

2. Because the airlines have fruitlessly hoped to try and get passengers to pay for video and gaming entertainment on their ridiculous, slow, awkward, and unattractive in-flight systems.

But people have their own content - books, movies, TV shows, et. al. - on their phones and tablets, and they aren't interested in the unappetizing offerings from the airlines.

This rule isn't about safety - it's about stupidity and greed (mainly greed). Thankfully, it's come to an end (except during takeoff/landing, but everyone ignores it) in the US and now in most (not all) other countries.

[mathewjg]

Yes - I think you do have the correct answer - thousands of people in the air travelling many times faster than normal ground traffic could cause problems with handover from one cell to the next, specially over cities where a cell can be a single block of buildings. Even though speech might not be possible or if it is then subject to regular drop outs, there is a possibility that the signalling between the phone and base station will still continue and cause some problems to the network. The rules about using mobiles in planes go back to the early days of mobiles when those big brick phones could give out much more power than current models (also not very good health wise). I am guessing that the aircraft systems were not as good at rejecting interference in those days, so given the lower output power of current phones and improved resilience of aircraft systems its probably the mobile phone operators that are resisting the use of phones on planes.

The short answer is "not really". The first thing is that all the avionics on the plane have to meet a lot of technical rules - one of them is called DO-160, and one of the things it covers is EMC - both in terms of interference generated and susceptibility to external signals. The RF levels the equipment is exposed to in these tests is far in excess of anything that a mobile phone could generate (especially in the latest DO-160G revision, which calls for HIRF tests).

Against this, there is no real reason to allow the use of mobile phones on the plane unless there is specific on-board equipment to allow them to operate, since all the current mobile phone signalling protocols require that the MS obtains timing synchronization with the BTS and as a result there are hard limits to both the maximum range and the relative velocity between the MS and the BTS. The old analog systems (like AMPS) didn't have this restriction and could connect as long as the signal could be detected in both directions. Some TDMA phones (IS-54/IS-136 and GSM) could operate outside their supposed maximum range as long as the next time slot wasn't being used by anything else (this was heavily software dependent, though - and at least in GSM was in theory a spec violation). The pure CDMA systems (IS-95/CDMA2k, UMTS and LTE) just don't work at all unless the required timing advance is in range.

The proposals allowing mobile phone use on planes are based on placing a microcell on board the aircraft, and don't run into these limits - this also has the desirable side effect of making all the phones operate at the lowest possible transmitted power because they are so close to the base station.

[connda]

It's probably the cause of the disappearance of MH380.

[Skint]

Klm has aerocomm has anyone used it?

[Ulic]

It is not dangerous at all but it is annoying to the persons sitting near you. Courtesy would lead most to just text

rather than talk on the phone but there are many who have no common courtesy. The only issue is the cell signal

can tie up multiple towers at the same time. It does not interfere with cockpit communication. That is just the excuse

the airlines are asked to give the flying public.

[Nayet]

If it was dangerous, they would not leave it up to passengers to ensure that no cell phones are switched on.

[ericjt]

If they'd drop the BS about doing it for "safety" and just say they're banning cel phones so as to not disturb the other passengers who prefer a little peace and quiet, I think the ban would go down a lot more easily.

They could also help the passengers (like me) who prefer a little peace and quiet by not yapping so much themselves over the PA.

I really don't need them to tell me about the weather where we're going, or the pilot to welcome me on board and yammer on about how much they appreciate me flying XXXX airline, or the advertisements for food, frequent passenger miles, etc.

I'd prefer that they can it and let us fly in peace.

[Hua Hin expat]

Try this next time. When the person sitting next to you starts talking on their cell, start answering them as if they were talking to you. When they get annoyed just repeat, "Yep, it is very annoying isn't it?"

What you are talking about is called cell phone crashing. Here are some clips of it on Youtube taken with a hidden camera. Very funny. This first clip is at the airport but if you search Youtube for ‘cell phone crashing’ you’ll find links to this being done at football matches, disneyland, the park – all over the place.

Oh dear, I've found a new hobby

Sent from my EPad

[songhklasid]

I would have challenged the bloke, told to switch off as per crew instructions as he could possibly be endangering the aircraft & passengers.I flew A.Asia hanoi- bangkok earlier this year, there was a young bloke untidily dressed (fellow passenger) who was bare footed, I give him an amazed look, & pointed to his feet, and said where's you shoes mate, so as the A.A. staff overheard, but they allowed him to board,I would have told him to walk, am I a cranky old bastard, I don't think so , just brought up with more respectfull manors to fellow man.

regards Songhklasid.

[Sealbash]

Cell phone blocking technology exists. Why do the airlines not just employ it in aircraft?

Sent from my iPad using Thaivisa Connect Thailand

[Langsuan Man]

Cell phone blocking technology exists. Why do the airlines not just employ it in aircraft?

Sent from my iPad using Thaivisa Connect Thailand

Because "jammers" produce a white noise that blocks the cell phone signal which will most likely block cockpit electronics

[Sealbash]

Cell phone blocking technology exists. Why do the airlines not just employ it in aircraft?

Sent from my iPad using Thaivisa Connect Thailand

Because "jammers" produce a white noise that blocks the cell phone signal which will most likely block cockpit electronics

If the "jammer" could block cockpit electronics, that would indicate cell phones and cockpit signals are similar. Hence the need to turn off cell phones?

Sent from my iPad using Thaivisa Connect Thailand