[telecom] Disruptions: The Real Hazards of E-Devices on Planes

My feeling toward airline passengers who want to pretend that they are radio-frequency engineers is probably shared by most other travellers. I think these spoiled brats *deserve* to be punched in the face.

I don't *CARE* if there's only a 0.001% chance of a dumbphone or a laptop or a notepad or a pda interfering with an aircraft's radios. All I know *for* *a* *fact* is that the aircraft navigation systems which are in use /right/ /now/ to guide airplanes into landings during inclement weather were designed over fifty years ago, and that it is

This is one of those things that has to be decided by the worst possible outcome, not the best. We must, in conscience, subject some airline passengers to a minor inconvenience because our society is built on the idea that it should be run for the benefit of the majority, not for the hubris of a few arrogant fools: the worst outcome is dead, burnt bodies lying on the ground amid the wreckage of the houses and the lives that could be ruined by one person's selfishness.

Bill

People leave vast numbers of phones and computers turned on in their briefcases and coats in the overhead bins out of sheer forgetfulness, not malice. I've done it a few times.

If there were any actual hazard due to these things, planes would be falling out of the sky every day.

Also, don't forget that a lot of planes are now retrofitted with in flight wifi, such as the 737 I flew on today, and in Europe there are a fair number of equally old planes with in flight mobile service. (It's easier there, since all phones are GSM and nearly all work on international roaming networks.) I am fairly sure they do not change the avionics when they install this stuff.

R's, John

If planes were falling out of the sky every day, the problem would be obvious, and therefore it would be easy to deal with. After all, nobody debates the need to ground a fleet when doors fall off or some other defect becomes plain for all to see.

Interference to air navigation and communications systems is much harder to deal with: it's expedient to ignore the risk, precisely because it is /not/ obvious, just as shoring up the levees in New Orleans was an easy-to-ignore solution to a "Maybe, someday" problem of having to deal with a Category Five hurricane. Bluntly put, humans are terrible at assessing and addressing risk when they have to give up anything in order to do it, such as the money to reinforce levees. We are merely awful at doing it when it costs nothing or even delivers real, tangible benefits: look at the rates of heart disease associated with high-fat diets and lack of exercise.

It was, of course, wishful thinking to expect that the Ninth ward of New Orleans would never have to face the fact that it is below sea level, but our politicians have raised wishful thinking to a high art, aided by the ever-so-persuasive lobbyists that whisper in their ears:

• They wish that confiscating fluids from air travellers would make planes safe, even though Bruce Schneier pointed out that the TSA's "Security Theater" imposes no penalty for failure, and so a bomber can simply go through the checkpoint again and again until he succeeds.

• They wish that terrorists will confine their attention to our air transport industry, and not bother the millions of gallons of poison gas - excuse me, I meant water treatment chemicals - that moves by rail through our major cities on a daily basis.

• They wish that nobody ever felt the need to write them and complain about pesky flight attendents telling airline passengers to turn off their electronic devices.

All this wishful thinking is caused by an inconvenient political truth: voters go nuts when anyone tells them "No". It doesn't matter if the travelling public is utterly clueless about the risks of mixing

The travelling public doesn't want to know that air travel can be dangerous, and being forced to turn off electronic distractions just at the times when they are most nervous - takeoffs and landings - is the hottest of hot-button issues. We may as well tell airline passengers that they must pay for their seats based on their body weight, or travel to a different city to ease traffic congestion around their chosen destination. Such ideas, although they make sense to an engineer, are anathema to political leaders.

There is yet another toadstool in this soup: nobody wants to hear about the difference between "AM" and "Spread Spectrum" or "Single Sideband", and nobody wants to get their head around the fact that a cellular "telephone" is really an radio-frequency transceiver, or the fact that their expensive new ipad contains an electronic oscillator which generates radio-frequency interference. As a practical matter, it's impossible to educate the travelling public about the ways that aircraft "Navigational Systems" are in use even on cloudless days, or that an interference source ten feet away from the cockpit can be hundreds or thousands of times more powerful than the navigation transmitters located miles away on the ground, because of the square-law rule which determines signal strength.

In summary, we have a situation where the risks are distant, poorly defined, subject to debate, and easy to dismiss. The "benefits", OTOH, are immediate, apparent, and tangible. The passengers want to act normal in a tense and clautrophobic environment, and they resent "experts" telling them "no".

I'm surprised that the planes /haven't/ fallen out of the sky. Then again, we'll never know if they haven't already.

Bill

Actually... there's a huge amount of retrofitting and changes in high risk industries in general, and in water treatment plants in particular. Specifically because of post 9/11 concerns.

Check with your local water treatment plant, for example. There's a good chance they've switched from using chlorine tanks, which if breached would cause massive ugliness, to using, umm, some chlorinated compound whose name escapes me. If the new stockpile was damaged it still wouldn't be any fun, but the destructive potential is far less.

One related reaction is to encase the "road level", so to speak, portions of the NYC area bridge support cables in a concrete tube. So while you can walk alongside them, you can no longer grab the actual metal.

The concept here is that... if some unfriendly type or another slaps an explosive knapsack on the (now covered) cable, the blast might still take out that one riser, but the other half dozen neighbors won't get affected.

Is this/are these overreactions? Maybe, maybe not. But this sort of stuff is low cost and non intrusive. And the changes in water treatment protocols reduce the general, not just the 9/11, dangers.

I'm sorry to say that the destructive potential is actually greater: it's not our lives that terrorists want to end, but our life*style*. A leak or spill of a less dangerous chemical is more disruptive than one of chlorine gas, for several reasons:

1. There's only one procedure in place for chemical spills, and only one option when they occur: evacuation and containment. It doesn't matter if there "should" be a lower response level for a "less dangerous" chemical: as a practical matter, the first-responders must be trained to deal with each event in the same way.
2. No matter how dangerous the chemical, there will be panic. Every mother will demand that her kid be removed from day care, and every business in the affected area will have to shut down.
3. U.S. Media always hype the danger of _any_ chemical spill, and so the public perception of an attack will be as great, or greater, than it would be for a chrorine leak.

This thread is about the dangers of electronic devices on airplanes, but it's also about the ways we assess and deal with risk. The most effective terrorist attack is not a firestorm or a flood: it is the smell of some unknown substance burning, combined with a leaking roof, because the terrorist wants to leverage our own fear to maximize the effect of his attacks. I'll paraphrase Bruce Schneier: Al Queda cannot terrorize us. Only we can do that.

Bill

OBTelecom: If you think the cellular networks were jammed during hurricane Sandy, wait until you try to make a call during a hypefest event like a "Dangerous Chemical Spill".

-- Bill Horne (Remove QRM from my address to write to me directly) Copyright (C) 2013 E.W. Horne. All Rights Reserved.

Having read FFIEC, NERC and PCI/DSS documents I can tell you that a lot of those are wishful thinking too, particularly FFIEC and NERC. PCI/DSS at least has some standards to which payment processors must adhere.

But banking and energy - in essence all they have to do is log it.

It seems to me it would make good sense to reroute rail lines around major cities generally, especially now that most passenger service has gone away.

Maybe that's the only thing the first-responders do (which is understandable, since a small spill/leak/fire can easily become a large one before they get there). But the specifics of the chemical and its concentration make a big difference to what people in the area need to do immediately, and to what is likely to happen to people who are caught by surprise. By the time the radio or CD sirens tell the public what's going on, most of the deaths or injuries, if any, that are going to happen have already happened or at least can't be prevented.

A few years ago I was a truck driver. The scariest thing that ever happened to me was when I made a pickup at a paper mill: when I drove up to the gate, the guard handed me goggles and a respirator mask, and said "if that siren goes off, you better put these on quick!" Understand, I wasn't scared for myself as much as for the public. The mill was in a suburb of a major city, and if they had to provide ME with safety equipment for a two hour visit, then why the bleep aren't they required to provide it to everyone who lives or works within two or three miles, since those people are exposed to that same danger every single day? It boggles the mind.

BTW: I agree with your main point that most danger-hype is just theater, and the TSA in particular should be abolished. But not all dangers are imaginary and not all precautions are worth less than they cost. This is where science, properly used and not slanted by people with axes to grind, could really help but is prevented from doing so by the government hype machine.

It makes the best sense to have the rail lines deliver products _as_close_ _as_possible_ to the destination. The accident rate 'per ton-mile' on hazmat loads is far lower for rail than any other mode of land transport.

That aside, the costs for relocating all freight rail service outside of "major cities" would be incredibly expensive -- laying track, signaling, etc., is millions per mile, exclusive of land costs. not to mention the switchyards, terminal facilities for loading/unloading 'piggyback' trailers, etc. *and* the highway infrastructure to get stuff from the new yards to the destination, and the numbers get _really_big_ in short order.

And, what do you do on the East Coast, where it's all built-up territory?

Where's all the money to _pay_ for this going to come from?

Here in RI passenger sitll uses the rail. The line runs nearby to me and friends of ours in East Greenwich live right next to the tracks.