Phones on a Plane
There’s something about Computerworld articles that just rub me the wrong way, even when I largely agree with them. Check it out, here they post a little something about why we still are not allowed to use phones on a plane.
Their basic point is that phones are banned officially for two possible reasons, they may interfere with avionics and they may interfere with cell towers on the ground. Both of these haven’t been verified in 20 years, according to the article. That’s the part I agree with, from what I’ve read neither of these are proven facts and that is a little ridiculous. The article goes on to suggest why everyone likes it that way from the airlines, to the cell carriers to the government.
The central belief is that by not identifying the specific problems that cell use in the air may cause, all these parties can simply ban the use of phones. If the real problem was known, they would be forced to address the problems with different types of shielding on the plane or cell towers or what have you. This is a little bit where they start to lose me, if all these agencies can manage 20 years of dodging doing any research into this, if the research was there, I’m sure they could go another 20 years without actually doing anything about it.
I suspect that they also needed to pad out the article and have more parties involved in the conspiracy so they add stuff like this:
Cell phones and other electronics vary in how much they could interfere with avionics. If it’s determined that some devices do cause problems, all gadgets would have to do extra certification testing, which the government doesn’t want to spend the money to do.
Computerworld doesn’t know the difference between the active two way radio of a phone and the tiny amount of radiation an mp3 player makes? Honestly. Or maybe they say something like this:
U.S. airlines alone carry on average some 2 million passengers per day. If just 1% of these passengers accidentally or deliberately leaves their cell phones on, that means some 20,000 cell phones remain on during flights every single day. Despite this, no crash has ever been definitively attributed to cell phone or gadget interference.
20,000 cellphones, across 24 hours, across how many flights? Computerworld doesn’t see the difference between say 2 or 3 phones (in a purse or pocket) on a plane and 30 or 40 on and in active use on a plane?
In all these cases, I’m not saying that these things would or wouldn’t have a real effect, and that’s the point of the article - we don’t know and that is totally lame. The problem is, they went and padded out their article with all these crazy notions and ideas that just detract from the central theme. I can only surmise that there’s a minimum word count they needed to hit. If they had cut out all the fluff, it would have been much more convincing and much less aggravating.
But here’s my bottom line. I would absolutely hate it if they allowed cell usage on the plane. Flying on a plane can be difficult enough, it would be insanely awful if it was filled with people screaming at the top of their lungs on the phones and with all the white noise of the plane engines, people will definitely be yelling into their phones. So if it all really is foot dragging on whoever’s part that’s keeping this banned, I am all for keeping that foot well and truly down.
