Europe approves use of in-flight electronics during take-off and landing

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/14/europe-approves-electronic-devices-take-off-landing-easa-caa

by poissonpie • 13 years ago

189 91 13 years ago

theguardian.com

venomsnake2• 13 years ago

Not that someone was obeying those rules anyway. But better to make it official.

mseebach• 13 years ago

Yes they were. Flight attendants consistently ask people to put away their Kindles and iPads.

Of course they didn't and couldn't check if the devices are completely switched off (or even in flight safe mode), but they very much keep people from using them.

viraptor• 13 years ago

Flying mostly from/to the UK, that's not exactly what I saw. Most of the time people will put the device on their lap with the screen turned off and get back to using it as soon as the flight attendants are in their seats. Pretty much the same thing with "please leave your seatbelts fastened until the engines are off" (with click, click, click all around).

wil4213• 13 years ago

Yes you were.

nodata• 13 years ago

No they weren't: the rule was "turn devices to airplane mode AND power them off". I don't know anybody that powered them off.

thaumasiotes• 13 years ago

but they very much keep people from using them.

I think you mean "suppress their use for literally seconds at a time".

anarchitect• 13 years ago

For sure. I was once asked to remove my headphones even though they were visibly not plugged in to anything (I wanted to block out the noise from takeoff).

Zigurd5• 13 years ago

That's the purpose of those rules: To give flight attendants a plausible safety-related task. That takes the passengers' minds off the fact that airliner safety rituals for passengers are absurd and that other aspects of in-flight service are sub-par.

wepple2• 13 years ago

I've heard (from Pilot friends) that Pilots & Flight Attendants are the worst for leaving devices switched on.

A while back, a JetStar pilot forgot to drop the landing gear coming into Singapore because he got a txt message

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1286044/Jetstar-pilo...

socialist_coder• 13 years ago

My German wife would actually get pretty mad at me for using my devices during takeoff/landing. rollseyes

ipedrazas• 13 years ago

Well, she will have no excuse from December onwards :)

wil4213• 13 years ago

I have been doing this for years on my gameboy/sega/iphone/ipad/mac. I even turned my airplane mode off to see how long it would take to loose service last time I flew. (I dont fly very often)

matiasb• 13 years ago

How long does it take? On my last flight the man sitting next to me started receiving SMS many, many meters before landing

codfrantic• 13 years ago

I was a passenger sitting in the co-pilot's seat on a small plane in Africa, the pilot was texting during the flight even at 10,000 feet ^_^.

wil4213• 13 years ago

It was pretty soon after I don't know the altitude but it was within 5 minutes of leaving the ground.

sqs• 13 years ago

I saw a passenger next to me texting at 37k feet over Kansas on an JFK-SFO flight once. It was SMS, not iMessage (the message bubbles were green). How did he get signal up there?

mikeash5• 13 years ago

In my limited experience (not on an airliner, so actually legalish), signal is usually good below 4,000ft, almost guaranteed to be gone above 6,000ft, and hit or miss in between.

flexie• 13 years ago

How many flights take off or land with all passengers and crew members in full compliance with the current rules? Close to none.

Say commercial planes have 60 passengers/crew member in average. 5 don't have any devices (small kids). Of the 55 passengers that have one or more devices, maybe 30 turn off their devices as they are told, 15 put them on airplane mode and 10 don't give a shit or just forget it.

If there are 20 million flights per year there have been some 400 million flights in the 20 years where cell phones have been common. 400 million flights of which 99 percent have flown with some passengers' phones turned on. Has there ever been a single flight accident due to cell phones? Just one?

gizzlon• 13 years ago

I don't know anything about this, but it could be that the risk was higher the more devices where on.

gnaffle8• 13 years ago

Yep, if you read the FAA position, that's the idea. The risk wasn't seen as huge, but since there was a possibility of interference the trade-off seemed reasonable. Just one of the many small things done to improve safety.

steeve• 13 years ago

My understanding was that it hasn't to do with phones being turned on per se, but rather one's attention at the moment the flight is the riskiest: at take off and landing.

The rationale was that when you're playing on your device, you're paying less attention to the crew and what's around you, which can be problematic in case something bad happens and you need to react.

EDIT: I'm just the messenger, guys ;)

arethuza• 13 years ago

I quite often get early morning flights (e.g. I got a 05:50 on Monday) - usually by the time the flight takes off I am already sleeping. Nobody has every tried to wake me up so that I pay attention to take off or landing.

Sambdala• 13 years ago

My understanding is that's the common ex post rationalization that arose to try to come up with a plausible-sounding reason for this idiotic rule.

rlpb• 13 years ago

On the other hand, you're permitted to be absorbed in a book or newspaper.

masklinn• 13 years ago

Books don't have to be "turned off" during takeoff and landing. You don't have to wake up either if you're sleeping.

wepple2• 13 years ago

this seems valid to me - they put just as much emphasis on ensuring your window shade is up (for post-crash hazard identification) to electronics being switched off.

It's likely due to attentiveness should you need to evac

hackerboos• 13 years ago

I've never switched off my devices during take-off or landing because if it actually risked any damage then they'd be screening people before they board.

dalore• 13 years ago

I picture it now. Terrorists boarding flight after flight with their mobiles on thinking, this time it will work.

danik• 13 years ago

That's a very weird view of things. Do you really think this rule exists without a reason? Why not just follow the rules and turn your devices off, it's not going to hurt you, but a crash could.

gnaffle8• 13 years ago

There haven't been any accidents AFAIK, but there have been several reported incidents: http://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/docs/rpsts/ped.pdf - see page 54 for one example.

As newer airplanes are better shielded and old ones are taken out of service, the number of reported incidents have dropped in recent years down to 1-2 per year, which isn't much given the massive increase in PEDs and number of flights.

The report that the FAA published actually has a lot of interesting info about this: http://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/ped/media/ped_arc_final...

Zigurd5• 13 years ago

For the same reason the above message cites as reasons to think the rules were always bunk, the "reported incidents" are also likely to be bunk. It is very unlikely that any one passenger's electronics are the only electronics left on, and therefore very unlikely that the guy who gets berated for leaving his iPod on is causing any problems.

eitally• 13 years ago

I just got home from my first trip since the FAA changed their rules, and it was really quite refreshing not to be able to continue using [non-radio] devices. Among other things, I think it generally calms the passengers and makes them less unruly.

joeyh• 13 years ago

Seems clearly to have been done in reaction to, or in cooperation with the change in the US.

I wonder why no European or other country got out in front and made this change earlier?

schrodinger• 13 years ago

Because we lead the world in freedom!

bergie• 13 years ago

We have a shared Aviation Authority in EU in the form of EASA, so this isn't something a particular European country could do on its own.

obiefernandez2• 13 years ago

I was recently on a transatlantic flight during which our Boeing 767's right jet engine caught fire and blew out. It was a terrible experience and I can assure you that at least for the first 5-10 minutes nobody on the plane was buried in their books or personal electronics. Everyone was suppressing panic and desperately paying attention to whatever shreds of information we could get from the flight attendants. The whole excuse about wanting people to pay attention during an emergency is total crap. Once your body kicks into survival mode the last thing on your mind is your phone.

alexholehouse• 13 years ago

Holy crap. That's terrifying - where were you when it blew out? How did the staff (pilots and stewards/stewardesses) behave - I've always wondered how well anyone, no matter how much they were trained, would cope in a real [potential] emergency on an aircraft?

ghaff• 13 years ago

Many years ago, I was on a 747 when an engine blew out (by which I mean a column of flame came out of the engine--no exterior physical damage). As I recall, they didn't say anything about a problem at first but the plane diverted to the nearest airport which happened to be Kuwait; this was long before the Gulf War etc. 747's have four engines though so this was possibly a less serious problem than on a two engine plane.

obiefernandez2• 13 years ago

We were about an hour away from the nearest airport in Ireland. The staff reacted pretty poorly IMO... no information given whatsoever for the first few minutes. Everyone was freaking out. If you're interested full story is here: http://obiefernandez.com/writing/2013/8/10/engine-failure

venomsnake2• 13 years ago

Maybe - but I still has this photo of me leaving the office building during a fire holding my PC's harddrive. The whole workstation was too heavy sadly.

neilmiddleton• 13 years ago

You reckon you'll have time to remove the hard drive? ;)

omegant• 13 years ago

It´s never been about passenger attention, it was electronic interference in the navigation, control and communication systems.

vacri2• 13 years ago

The theory was attention while you're being told what to do in an emergency, not during the emergency itself.

adeptus• 13 years ago

I've always wondered why they had this rule in the first place. Each wireless device by FCC rules (or equivalent dept in each country) must operate withing a designated RF frequency range.

One would think that pilots would use a frequency range that would be in the private (not public like Wifi 2.4/5.x Gh) range and thus never be overlapped.

What am I missing?

gnaffle8• 13 years ago

RF testing requirements and efforts vary from country to country, and even with certified devices there might be manufacturing defects that could cause interference. So it's impossible to be 100% certain.

The rules were there as a "better safe than sorry" measure, implemented at a time when most people didn't carry many electronic devices (way before cell phones became popular). The pilots have training to fly with multiple instrument failures, but even so you want to do what you can to reduce the risk of that happening.

RF interference can occur in a wide area of the spectrum, so it's not really possible to eliminate it just by changing frequencies. Even if you could, getting the aviation community to change their frequencies which are used all over the world in all airplanes and at all airports would be exceptionally expensive.

noselasd• 13 years ago

What am I missing?

So there is a few reasons.

Flying is serious business. You don't want to take any risks having your metal box carrying a few hundred people fall down. You really do not.

Aircrafts are also pretty complex, and the parts, electronics, engines, wires and so on are undergoing heavy testing and verification before you use that part to build an aircraft. This is quite unlike consumer devices such as mobile phones, which just have to pass the minimum government tests to be sold to common people.

As there's numerous different mobile phones, with all sorts of radios in them, it's too hard to test/verify that none of them interfers with any of the electronics your airplane has. (I'm sure you've heard the recognizable sounds in a nearby speaker on an incoming call/SMS on a GSM phone - these devices really do influence other electronic.)

The easy solution is to just ban them, and require them to be turned off, because even if the chance is ever so small, you don't want to risk your plane full of people to fall down.

Once that policy was in place, many many years ago, it takes a lot of inertia to change. No executive wants to be the one making the decision and a few days later learn that something quite bad happened.

Add in the bonus of not having passengers be annoyed at the neighbour chatting away at the phone, and the passengers being more attentive during takeoff/landing.

CamperBob22• 13 years ago

Flying is serious business. You don't want to take any risks having your metal box carrying a few hundred people fall down. You really do not.

Sounds like an excellent reason to prohibit bringing untested electronic devices onboard in the first place.

The fact that such a prohibition is not in place means that the whole thing is just so much security theater.

sciguy77• 13 years ago

Skymall is fucked.

btbuildem• 13 years ago

Such a bunk rule anyways. If there was the remotest chance of a phone / kindle / whatever interfering with in-flight systems, bringing any electronics onboard would be expressly forbidden. They'd take them away from you at the security screening (like they do with the extremely dangerous water bottles and nail clippers these days..)

bitops• 13 years ago

As long as they never allow anyone to talk on their cellphone during flights, I'm happy.

Europe approves use of in-flight electronics during take-off and landing

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