With more than 28,000 commercial flights in the skies over the United States every day, there are probably few sentences in the English language that are spoken more often and insistently than this: "Please turn off all electronic devices".
Asking why passengers must turn off their mobile phones on airplanes seems like an odd question. Because, with a sentence said so often there simply must be a reason for it. Or - is there not?
Flight attendants are required to make their preflight safety announcement by the Federal Communications Commission because of potential interference to the aircraft's navigation and communication systems. Perhaps this seems like a no-brainer: turning off your cellphone inside a piece of technology as sensitive as an airplane. In our civilized times, there are only a few things imaginable which more likely lead to direct physical conflict with the person in the seat next to you than turning on your cellphone during takeoff and nonchalantly calling your hairdresser to reschedule that appointment next Wednesday. In Great Britain, a 28-year-old oil worker was sentenced to 12 months in prison in 1999 for refusing to switch off his cellphone on a flight from Madrid to Manchester. He was convicted of recklessly and negligently endangering an aircraft.
Yet with people losing their freedom over the rule, it may come as a bit of a surprise that scientific studies have never actually proven a serious risk associated with the use of mobile phones on airplanes. In the late 1990s, when cellphones and mobile computers became mainstream, Boeing received reports from concerned pilots who had experienced system failures and suggested the problems may have been caused by laptops and phones the cabin crew had seen passengers using in-flight. Boeing actually bought the equipment from the passengers but was unable [to] reproduce any of the problems, concluding it had not been able to find a definite correlation between passenger-carried portable electronic devices and the associated reported airplane anomalies.
Please, PLEASE, do not submit "quoted-printable" posts. I know that M$'s borken, brain-dead take-over-the-world email clients love quoted-printable, but it's very difficult to edit, moderate, or approve. It took me 22 minutes to get this port into "acceptable" condition for publication, and I had to mail it to a differnet address, convert the character encoding, and take out the M$ you-will-be-assimilated characters.
It's easier to reject this stuff. Someone caught me in a good mood, with time on my hands. You have been warned: next time, rtfm and submit with "content-transfer-encoding=8bit".
Bill Horne Moderator