Violent, Electronic Skies

[direwolf23]

Yesterday I read an article about an elderly man who assaulted a 15 year old who refused to turn his cell phone off a the request of flight attendants.The article itself is nothing much of note as altercations, physical or otherwise, occur all the time between people for any number of reasons. What struck me as strange about this incident was the

Comments

[aiden_raccoon]

The main issue actually is not the use of phones and laptops, on take off and landing, to mess up the instrument panel. They ban the use of them because they want you to secure them so that they aren't loose projectiles. The instrument panel thing is there to scare people though. Even Mythbusters did that show where they amped up a cell phone signal to like 500 times or something and nothing happened even remotely.

[djdragonboy]

Federal Aircraft Regulations (FAR) allow the pilot of an aircraft to determine if onboard electronic devices are causing interference and the authority to have them shut off. This applies to any device. They do interfere; I have experienced it myself. The FCC regulation prohibiting their use has more to do with impact on the ground-based towers. Normally your phone only reaches a few adjacent towers at a time, using up its allocated bandwidth/time slice only in that area. In a high-altitude aircraft, your phone will hit a great many towers, causing interference on occupied channels and stressing the tower handoff system with situations it was not designed for. Some airlines do offer cellphone use now by using an onboard transciever for your phone to connect to and taking the load off the ground-based system.

[sasya_fox]

14 CFR 91.21 (a) (1) and (2) -- Or, for a clearer view on the FAA's policy, see: AC91-21 1B.

Personally, I have had a passenger's cellphone interfere with instrument flight operations, so yes, it can be a problem.

As far as the rest of the statement above, there are many unsupported leaps of logic, and extensions of assumptions into conjecture.

That said, as far as commenters go: They're all idiots, and one should avoid reading comments on anything, for the sake of sanity. ~.^

~Foxy

[pseudomanitou]

Not sure if I agree completely on the FCC or FAA policies -- but we all know both need some significant changes towards what works best for consumers, not just lazy business models.

I will say that -- teens who have attitude also need to learn how to fight to back it up. People are only rooting for the old man because the fight was one-sided; losers love standing behind a winner.