Britain's CAA Considers Laptop Ban on Commercial Aircraft 384
hayb writes "An article in Britain's The Register claims that NASA and United Airlines have conducted tests on various aircraft and have found that ultra-wideband (UWB) devices "knocked out" collision-avoidance systems and impaired instrument landing systems.
It states that the blanket ban on all devices in necessary because flight crews do not have the knowledge to differentiate between standard notebooks and ones with UWB devices."
Air Traffic Control (Score:1, Informative)
From a certain point of view this means that the TCAS (Traffic Collision Avoidance System) should be used really rarely.
From the other side it means that a few instruments are provided to pilots as emergency tools.
I'm used to play with my laptop when travelling, but as a simple passenger i'd prefer to keep all emergency instrument in a perfect state.
Re:airline security is apparently still lacking (Score:3, Informative)
Damn right!
A year or two ago, I went to a lecture from an expert in radio interference from DERA (UK Defence Evaluation and Research Agency - the guys who write the UK's rules on this stuff) and he showed us a graph of the requirements for noise immunity (as in, if your plane's electronics can't take this level of noise at this frequency, it's grounded). Then he showed us the maximumoutput of a cellphone. In short: find me a plane which is genuinely affected by use of a phone inside, and I'll show you a plane which won't be leaving the ground any time soon...
Not to mention, as others have pointed out, any aircraft system that vulnerable to interference is just begging to be knocked down by terrorists - forget planting a bomb, just get a little battery-powered RF transmitter on! A slightly modified electric shaver would probably do just fine...
There is a genuine reason not to use cellphones in aircraft, though: cellphone networks are carefully designed to avoid frequency conflicts between towers with the phone being at ground level. Put a phone at 30,000 feet, and it "sees" multiple cells on each frequency - which apparently can upset the phone network.
Of course, the airlines don't like you using phones (other than their $5/min "skyphones", of course) or anything else interactive, because it stops you buying expensive drinks (on domestic flights), duty free (on international flights) etc. How "convenient" that United just found a "safety" reason to stop you doing anything that doesn't involve paying them more money, huh?
RTFA (Score:2, Informative)
It's a story picked up from the London-based Times, which apparently quotes the UK's Civial Aviation Authority as saying "more research is needed".
Throwing a few keywords at Google found this article [google.com] in Aviation Week's [aviationnow.com] online pages from June 17 amongst other stories. From this, it appears that the unexpected effects occured at much higher usage levels than would be typical in consumer devices and only under some usage scenarios. While it does sound as though the interaction between this new source of interference and aircraft electronics needs more investigation, gleeful /. extrapolations to hand-held open-spark transmitters appear unwarranted.
Relax. The sky isn't falling yet.
As a student pilot... (Score:2, Informative)
The non-military GPS signals used by aircraft for navigation are much weaker than the military versions that are designed to be jam resistant. They are little more than noise.
There is talk about shutting down the old VOR based network of radio navigation since most pilots would rather use GPS. However, concerns about possible jamming of GPS signals has delayed the VOR phase out.
Collision avoidance systems used in large comercial aircraft are based on transponder signals used by air traffic control, which are based on old WWII friend or foe systems. In order to scale up to high traffic levels, these systems now use a lot of signal processing that is noise senstive. Air traffic control sometimes see's "Ghost" aircraft that are artifacts of noise.
So, eletronic navigation and traffic detection used in aircraft, large and small are vulnerable to incrased electronic noise. It is not unreasable that new uses of spectrium must ensure compatibility with existing systems.
These aircraft systems will not change anytime soon. The industry is very slow to change due to the risk of loss of life and the lawsuits that would follow.
Re:Britan?? (Score:2, Informative)
Look at the title of the article. They've put "Britan". Honestly.
Re:I'm not scared of flying.. (Score:5, Informative)
No, it's considered GOOD engineering. Believe it or not most of the high paid safety engineers that work on these things are not people that just assume that nothing bad will happen. Quite the opposite, they assume EVERYTHING bad will happen, and engineer for that. There are backups, failsafes, etc, etc. That, and the planes are checked and serviced all the time to ensure that all those systems are working as they should.
The airline construction industry is NOT the comptuer industry, they don't jsut slap something together and see how it works in the real world. They design and test, and test, and test, and test.
It takes a long time for a plane to be fully designed and tested, they have plenty of redundancy, and they are contiunally checked for failures. It is no miracle they don't fail often, it is good design and matenence.
Re:Exactly WHAT were they using? (Score:3, Informative)
The reason other people don't is because the word heterodyne is more typically used to discuss combining two signals for some intended purpose - for example, the combining of a carrier signal and an audio frequency signal. So, it's correct to say that any AM signal is a "heterodyne happening." It's also correct to say that two overlapping AM signals are a "heterodyne happening." You can avoid vagueness by referring to the latter as "interference".
It's not human nature to attempt to disect an already familiar word's base meaning when the context seems wrong.