4 ms·

Only took them, what, a decade? Maybe longer? Things like this breed distrust in the government. If they had reacted in a couple of years after wifi became p

Only took them, what, a decade? Maybe longer? Things like this breed distrust in the government. If they had reacted in a couple of years after wifi became prevalent you could easily argue the "we need more testing" angle and people would buy it. But after 10+ years there's no good excuse. What other stuff is happening right now that the government says is "unsafe" (and thus banned) which is actually safe, and what is "safe" (and thus not banned) which is not? The only way for a government to have a believable claim to legitimacy is to work ruthlessly to minimize false positives and false negatives and if/when they happen to root out the source of the problem and ensure it'll never happen again. Sadly we rarely see much or any of this.

breadbox 13y ago
Meh. I can't get too upset about overconservative flight safety regulations. Yes, the risk was utterly minuscule from the get-go, but the cost of an accident in-flight is being weighed against the cost of your fellow citizens not being allowed to log into Facebook.
- ghshephard 13y ago
  Taken to the logical extreme, it would seem that no electronics should be allowed on the plane. There is a reasonable line here. In a year 90% of us will think the current one was idiotic. Seriously - I can't read a kindle on takeoff/landing? Don't get me wrong - I'm all for eliminating risk - but it would have taken very little effort to add WiFi/Eletronic transmitter detectors to planes - the fact that they didn't, means that it was never a real risk.
- enraged_camel 13y ago
  >>Meh. I can't get too upset about overconservative flight safety regulations. No. No no no no. Logic like this is often used by the government to justify the existence of things like the TSA. "We need to be overconservative to prevent terrorist attacks." Except it doesn't work when the measures are of questionable benefit whereas the costs are astronomical.
  - mikeash 13y ago
    A major difference is that the TSA is largely protecting against a fictional threat, while the FAA's safety regulations are, overall, acting on proven dangers and are demonstrably successful. Airline travel used to be pretty dangerous. Today, in the US, it's about as safe as any human endeavor has ever been. The danger is close enough to zero that the delta cannot be properly measured. Even in the past decade or so, airline travel has become much safer. This particular policy was almost certainly not useful. But the overall regime of "better safe than sorry" has proven to be highly effective in this particular context.
    - enraged_camel 13y ago
      >>This particular policy was almost certainly not useful. But the overall regime of "better safe than sorry" has proven to be highly effective in this particular context. The context here is this particular policy, not FAA's approach to airline travel as a whole.
      - mbreese 13y ago
        You have to consider the agency and their mandates. What is it that is the FAA's number one priority: to make air travel safe. This means all of their policies are made from that perspective. They are a technical/regulatory agency, they don't really interact with the public. They interact with the airplane industry. As such, it's not really helpful to paint them with the same brush as the TSA or NSA. The FAA maybe slow to adjust their rules, but that doesn't mean it's with malice. The TSA, on the other hand, is all about interacting with the public to try and make us feel safer about travel in general. Generally, interacting with the public is rarely a strong point for any government agency.
      - mikeash 13y ago
        This particular policy exists (or existed) as it is (was) precisely because of the context of FAA's approach to airline travel as a whole. Sure, it's a bad policy. But it's a bad policy that came out of an overall approach that has proven to be superb. To think that this one failure is an indication of anything is absurd. You can't expect perfection.
ghshephard 13y ago
Another perspective is that your default position should be to distrust everything that the government communicates, and only accept as believable those things that you have identified yourself as being true. With regard to safety rules - there are usually two issues at hand, neither of which have anything to do with safety (particularly your safety). On the one hand, you have people who believe it is always better to err on the side of safety - whether that means you taking your shoes off every time you board a plane, patting down/scanning every single passenger, or saying you can't read a kindle during takeoff - there is ZERO cost to the person requiring that rule, and even an infinitesimal risk (say, 1 in a billion) means that there is real cost to the individual/group saying we can forego those precautions. Because the inconvenience/costs of the "Safety Rules" are born by others, but the potential (no matter how small) cost of not having that rule is borne by the individual who said it was no longer needed - the default position will ALWAYS be to add more safety rules. Pushing the other direction is $$$. Anytime people with $$$ are involved, all sorts of safety rules are dropped. There wasn't a big kindle/laptop lobby pushing for the dropping of the NoElectronics rule, which is why it lasted so long.
mikeash 13y ago
Let me first state up front: I think this policy was dumb and should have been done away with long ago. However, I think that "breed distrust in the government" quip is completely asinine. The FAA's airline policies overall have resulted in an industry where you can buy a ticket across the country for just a few hundred dollars, while simultaneously being so safe that it has become literally impossible to measure the danger of flying on an airliner in the US, because incidents don't happen frequently enough for there to be enough data. The electronic devices policy is/was a tiny little wart on an unbelievably successful regulatory environment. To act like this somehow destroys trust in government is insane. You're basically expecting perfection and rejecting a massive success as being terrible just because there's an extremely minor problem buried within.
- teraflop 13y ago
  It doesn't matter that the FAA is an effective organization and most of the regulations it comes up with are perfectly justified. The general public doesn't know what the training requirements are for pilots, or how to file a flight plan, or how the ATC system is run. They see this one policy regarding personal electronics, which is obviously flawed, and make judgments about the agency on that basis. So, rightly or wrongly, it does undermine public confidence in the FAA at least a little bit.
- msandford 13y ago
  It wasn't a quip that I made up to score points. I think it does undermine legitimacy of those making rules when it takes them 10 years to admit that they were wrong. The problem is that it's something very public and that everyone already knows it doesn't cause problems. There are all kinds of electronic devices which don't have an "off" button. Do they somehow magically not create EM interference? Tons of people have been ignoring the rules for years and it's taken years and years for the FAA to say "well you know maybe it's OK" The problem there is that there are all kinds of nutjobs out there who use this kind of thing to promote their own crazy theories. And because the timeline to go from most people understanding empirically that electronics don't crash planes to the FAA admitting it was so long, it lends credence to the idea that any rule could be bullshit. If it takes 10 years to find out that something was overly cautious, who's to say it might not take 20 or 30 for something else? Those arguments can be very persuasive to people already inclined to be skeptical.
adrr 13y ago
Seems like there some good justifications for why they were so cautious. There were suspected cases where a PED interfered with the plane. http://www.boeing.com/commercial/aeromagazine/aero_10/interfere_textonly.html http://www.boeing.com/commercial/aeromagazine/aero_10/interf...

breadbox 13y ago

Meh. I can't get too upset about overconservative flight safety regulations. Yes, the risk was utterly minuscule from the get-go, but the cost of an accident in-flight is being weighed against the cost of your fellow citizens not being allowed to log into Facebook.

ghshephard 13y ago
Taken to the logical extreme, it would seem that no electronics should be allowed on the plane. There is a reasonable line here. In a year 90% of us will think the current one was idiotic. Seriously - I can't read a kindle on takeoff/landing? Don't get me wrong - I'm all for eliminating risk - but it would have taken very little effort to add WiFi/Eletronic transmitter detectors to planes - the fact that they didn't, means that it was never a real risk.
enraged_camel 13y ago
>>Meh. I can't get too upset about overconservative flight safety regulations. No. No no no no. Logic like this is often used by the government to justify the existence of things like the TSA. "We need to be overconservative to prevent terrorist attacks." Except it doesn't work when the measures are of questionable benefit whereas the costs are astronomical.
- mikeash 13y ago
  A major difference is that the TSA is largely protecting against a fictional threat, while the FAA's safety regulations are, overall, acting on proven dangers and are demonstrably successful. Airline travel used to be pretty dangerous. Today, in the US, it's about as safe as any human endeavor has ever been. The danger is close enough to zero that the delta cannot be properly measured. Even in the past decade or so, airline travel has become much safer. This particular policy was almost certainly not useful. But the overall regime of "better safe than sorry" has proven to be highly effective in this particular context.
  - enraged_camel 13y ago
    >>This particular policy was almost certainly not useful. But the overall regime of "better safe than sorry" has proven to be highly effective in this particular context. The context here is this particular policy, not FAA's approach to airline travel as a whole.
    - mbreese 13y ago
      You have to consider the agency and their mandates. What is it that is the FAA's number one priority: to make air travel safe. This means all of their policies are made from that perspective. They are a technical/regulatory agency, they don't really interact with the public. They interact with the airplane industry. As such, it's not really helpful to paint them with the same brush as the TSA or NSA. The FAA maybe slow to adjust their rules, but that doesn't mean it's with malice. The TSA, on the other hand, is all about interacting with the public to try and make us feel safer about travel in general. Generally, interacting with the public is rarely a strong point for any government agency.
    - mikeash 13y ago
      This particular policy exists (or existed) as it is (was) precisely because of the context of FAA's approach to airline travel as a whole. Sure, it's a bad policy. But it's a bad policy that came out of an overall approach that has proven to be superb. To think that this one failure is an indication of anything is absurd. You can't expect perfection.

ghshephard 13y ago

Another perspective is that your default position should be to distrust everything that the government communicates, and only accept as believable those things that you have identified yourself as being true. With regard to safety rules - there are usually two issues at hand, neither of which have anything to do with safety (particularly your safety). On the one hand, you have people who believe it is always better to err on the side of safety - whether that means you taking your shoes off every time you board a plane, patting down/scanning every single passenger, or saying you can't read a kindle during takeoff - there is ZERO cost to the person requiring that rule, and even an infinitesimal risk (say, 1 in a billion) means that there is real cost to the individual/group saying we can forego those precautions. Because the inconvenience/costs of the "Safety Rules" are born by others, but the potential (no matter how small) cost of not having that rule is borne by the individual who said it was no longer needed - the default position will ALWAYS be to add more safety rules. Pushing the other direction is $$$. Anytime people with $$$ are involved, all sorts of safety rules are dropped. There wasn't a big kindle/laptop lobby pushing for the dropping of the NoElectronics rule, which is why it lasted so long.

mikeash 13y ago

Let me first state up front: I think this policy was dumb and should have been done away with long ago. However, I think that "breed distrust in the government" quip is completely asinine. The FAA's airline policies overall have resulted in an industry where you can buy a ticket across the country for just a few hundred dollars, while simultaneously being so safe that it has become literally impossible to measure the danger of flying on an airliner in the US, because incidents don't happen frequently enough for there to be enough data. The electronic devices policy is/was a tiny little wart on an unbelievably successful regulatory environment. To act like this somehow destroys trust in government is insane. You're basically expecting perfection and rejecting a massive success as being terrible just because there's an extremely minor problem buried within.

teraflop 13y ago
It doesn't matter that the FAA is an effective organization and most of the regulations it comes up with are perfectly justified. The general public doesn't know what the training requirements are for pilots, or how to file a flight plan, or how the ATC system is run. They see this one policy regarding personal electronics, which is obviously flawed, and make judgments about the agency on that basis. So, rightly or wrongly, it does undermine public confidence in the FAA at least a little bit.
msandford 13y ago
It wasn't a quip that I made up to score points. I think it does undermine legitimacy of those making rules when it takes them 10 years to admit that they were wrong. The problem is that it's something very public and that everyone already knows it doesn't cause problems. There are all kinds of electronic devices which don't have an "off" button. Do they somehow magically not create EM interference? Tons of people have been ignoring the rules for years and it's taken years and years for the FAA to say "well you know maybe it's OK" The problem there is that there are all kinds of nutjobs out there who use this kind of thing to promote their own crazy theories. And because the timeline to go from most people understanding empirically that electronics don't crash planes to the FAA admitting it was so long, it lends credence to the idea that any rule could be bullshit. If it takes 10 years to find out that something was overly cautious, who's to say it might not take 20 or 30 for something else? Those arguments can be very persuasive to people already inclined to be skeptical.

adrr 13y ago

Seems like there some good justifications for why they were so cautious. There were suspected cases where a PED interfered with the plane. http://www.boeing.com/commercial/aeromagazine/aero_10/interfere_textonly.html http://www.boeing.com/commercial/aeromagazine/aero_10/interf...