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Europe approves use of in-flight electronics during take-off and landing
- venomsnake 13y agoNot that someone was obeying those rules anyway. But better to make it official.
- mseebach 13y agoYes they were. Flight attendants consistently ask people to put away their Kindles and iPads. Of course they didn't and couldn't check if the devices are completely switched off (or even in flight safe mode), but they very much keep people from using them.
- viraptor 13y agoFlying mostly from/to the UK, that's not exactly what I saw. Most of the time people will put the device on their lap with the screen turned off and get back to using it as soon as the flight attendants are in their seats. Pretty much the same thing with "please leave your seatbelts fastened until the engines are off" (with click, click, click all around).
- CaptainZapp 13y agoI observe the click-click-clickers too and believe they are monumental idiots that not only endanger themselves, but other passengers as well. And all this for no good reason at all. Watch the video, taken by an amateur in JFK, of an AirFrance A380 touching a smaller plane and spinning it around and imagine you where sitting in the small plane not buckled up: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13054205 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13054205 The reason why this behavior mystifies me so much is that by jumping out of your seat prematurely you will be leaving the plane exactly 0 seconds earlier as when you remain buckled up until the plane is safely parked at the gate.
- epochwolf 13y agoStanding up in the aisle is more comfortable than sitting my fat butt in a tiny seat. :)
- yread 13y agoNot to mention turbulence, which can pick you up, bang your stupid head on the luggage bin so that it cracks and then throw you back in a seat. This seat might not even be yours and you injure other people with your stupidity. See http://edition.cnn.com/2013/06/05/travel/sg-airlines-turbulence/ http://edition.cnn.com/2013/06/05/travel/sg-airlines-turbule... or http://avherald.com/h?article=45946d01 http://avherald.com/h?article=45946d01
- vacri 13y agoI never understood the stander-uppers either... until I got caught behind someone who took 10 minutes to get their overstuffed luggage out of the overhead locker. That's an annoying wait. These days it's a crapshoot - if I have people waiting for me, I'll be a stander-upper. Otherwise I'll sit until it's clear.
- maggit 13y agoWell, I can't speak to your personal experience, but the "click-click-clicking" is in my experience a perfect example that most people try to do what the flight attendants tell them to. As soon as the plane lands, there is a tricke of clicks until the plane is parked. And when the "fasten your seatbelts"-sign is switched off, the rest of the passengers go "click". From my experience, this sounds like most of the passengers. (My experience is mostly from Norway and Europe in general)
- wil421 13y agoYes you were.
- nodata 13y agoNo they weren't: the rule was "turn devices to airplane mode AND power them off". I don't know anybody that powered them off.
- thaumasiotes 13y ago> but they very much keep people from using them. I think you mean "suppress their use for literally seconds at a time".
- anarchitect 13y agoFor sure. I was once asked to remove my headphones even though they were visibly not plugged in to anything (I wanted to block out the noise from takeoff).
- Zigurd 13y agoThat's the purpose of those rules: To give flight attendants a plausible safety-related task. That takes the passengers' minds off the fact that airliner safety rituals for passengers are absurd and that other aspects of in-flight service are sub-par.
- gnaffle 13y agoSure, they may be absurd, but the safety record of commercial air transport is absurd as well. (If you don't want or appreciate that safety level, light, ultralight or experimental aircraft are good options that allow for different risk tradeoffs).
- mikeash 13y agoWhat's absurd about the safety stuff, aside from the fact that most of us have the thing memorized by now and don't really need to hear it every time?
- wepple 13y agoI've heard (from Pilot friends) that Pilots & Flight Attendants are the worst for leaving devices switched on. A while back, a JetStar pilot forgot to drop the landing gear coming into Singapore because he got a txt message http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1286044/Jetstar-pilot-sending-text-messages-seconds-plane-abort-Singapore-landing.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1286044/Jetstar-pilo...
- socialist_coder 13y agoMy German wife would actually get pretty mad at me for using my devices during takeoff/landing. rollseyes
- ipedrazas 13y agoWell, she will have no excuse from December onwards :)
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- wil421 13y agoI have been doing this for years on my gameboy/sega/iphone/ipad/mac. I even turned my airplane mode off to see how long it would take to loose service last time I flew. (I dont fly very often)
- matiasb 13y agoHow long does it take? On my last flight the man sitting next to me started receiving SMS many, many meters before landing
- codfrantic 13y agoI was a passenger sitting in the co-pilot's seat on a small plane in Africa, the pilot was texting during the flight even at 10,000 feet ^_^.
- crdoconnor 13y agoThat happened to me too (except in Venezuela).
- hgh 13y agoI had a similar experience, small plane over a relatively hilly area in Zambia. It took me a bit to get past the assumption that the vibrating around my leg wasn't a structural problem with plane....
- wil421 13y agoIt was pretty soon after I don't know the altitude but it was within 5 minutes of leaving the ground.
- sqs 13y agoI saw a passenger next to me texting at 37k feet over Kansas on an JFK-SFO flight once. It was SMS, not iMessage (the message bubbles were green). How did he get signal up there?
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- flexie 13y agoHow many flights take off or land with all passengers and crew members in full compliance with the current rules? Close to none. Say commercial planes have 60 passengers/crew member in average. 5 don't have any devices (small kids). Of the 55 passengers that have one or more devices, maybe 30 turn off their devices as they are told, 15 put them on airplane mode and 10 don't give a shit or just forget it. If there are 20 million flights per year there have been some 400 million flights in the 20 years where cell phones have been common. 400 million flights of which 99 percent have flown with some passengers' phones turned on. Has there ever been a single flight accident due to cell phones? Just one?
- gizzlon 13y agoI don't know anything about this, but it could be that the risk was higher the more devices where on.
- gnaffle 13y agoYep, if you read the FAA position, that's the idea. The risk wasn't seen as huge, but since there was a possibility of interference the trade-off seemed reasonable. Just one of the many small things done to improve safety.
- steeve 13y agoMy understanding was that it hasn't to do with phones being turned on per se, but rather one's attention at the moment the flight is the riskiest: at take off and landing. The rationale was that when you're playing on your device, you're paying less attention to the crew and what's around you, which can be problematic in case something bad happens and you need to react. EDIT: I'm just the messenger, guys ;)
- arethuza 13y agoI quite often get early morning flights (e.g. I got a 05:50 on Monday) - usually by the time the flight takes off I am already sleeping. Nobody has every tried to wake me up so that I pay attention to take off or landing.
- eitally 13y agoI just got home from my first trip since the FAA changed their rules, and it was really quite refreshing not to be able to continue using [non-radio] devices. Among other things, I think it generally calms the passengers and makes them less unruly.
- joeyh 13y agoSeems clearly to have been done in reaction to, or in cooperation with the change in the US. I wonder why no European or other country got out in front and made this change earlier?
- schrodinger 13y agoBecause we lead the world in freedom!
- bergie 13y agoWe have a shared Aviation Authority in EU in the form of EASA, so this isn't something a particular European country could do on its own.
- obiefernandez 13y agoI was recently on a transatlantic flight during which our Boeing 767's right jet engine caught fire and blew out. It was a terrible experience and I can assure you that at least for the first 5-10 minutes nobody on the plane was buried in their books or personal electronics. Everyone was suppressing panic and desperately paying attention to whatever shreds of information we could get from the flight attendants. The whole excuse about wanting people to pay attention during an emergency is total crap. Once your body kicks into survival mode the last thing on your mind is your phone.
- alexholehouse 13y agoHoly crap. That's terrifying - where were you when it blew out? How did the staff (pilots and stewards/stewardesses) behave - I've always wondered how well anyone, no matter how much they were trained, would cope in a real [potential] emergency on an aircraft?
- ghaff 13y agoMany years ago, I was on a 747 when an engine blew out (by which I mean a column of flame came out of the engine--no exterior physical damage). As I recall, they didn't say anything about a problem at first but the plane diverted to the nearest airport which happened to be Kuwait; this was long before the Gulf War etc. 747's have four engines though so this was possibly a less serious problem than on a two engine plane.
- mitchty 13y agoI can't find the quote, but it was from a pilot of one of the first commercial 2 engined airliner jets, 737 or 777 I forget. Basically the reporter said, are you more worried if you lose one engine of two versus one engine of four on the 747/707/etc. To which the pilot replied, losing an engine is always a serious problem. Maybe if we ever get to my copilot saying we've lost engine 43 will it be a non issue. More engines just means more chances for failure. All I know is losing any engine isn't something you treat lightly.
- adeptus 13y agoI've always wondered why they had this rule in the first place. Each wireless device by FCC rules (or equivalent dept in each country) must operate withing a designated RF frequency range. One would think that pilots would use a frequency range that would be in the private (not public like Wifi 2.4/5.x Gh) range and thus never be overlapped. What am I missing?
- gnaffle 13y agoRF testing requirements and efforts vary from country to country, and even with certified devices there might be manufacturing defects that could cause interference. So it's impossible to be 100% certain. The rules were there as a "better safe than sorry" measure, implemented at a time when most people didn't carry many electronic devices (way before cell phones became popular). The pilots have training to fly with multiple instrument failures, but even so you want to do what you can to reduce the risk of that happening. RF interference can occur in a wide area of the spectrum, so it's not really possible to eliminate it just by changing frequencies. Even if you could, getting the aviation community to change their frequencies which are used all over the world in all airplanes and at all airports would be exceptionally expensive.
- noselasd 13y ago> What am I missing? So there is a few reasons. Flying is serious business. You don't want to take any risks having your metal box carrying a few hundred people fall down. You really do not. Aircrafts are also pretty complex, and the parts, electronics, engines, wires and so on are undergoing heavy testing and verification before you use that part to build an aircraft. This is quite unlike consumer devices such as mobile phones, which just have to pass the minimum government tests to be sold to common people. As there's numerous different mobile phones, with all sorts of radios in them, it's too hard to test/verify that none of them interfers with any of the electronics your airplane has. (I'm sure you've heard the recognizable sounds in a nearby speaker on an incoming call/SMS on a GSM phone - these devices really do influence other electronic.) The easy solution is to just ban them, and require them to be turned off, because even if the chance is ever so small, you don't want to risk your plane full of people to fall down. Once that policy was in place, many many years ago, it takes a lot of inertia to change. No executive wants to be the one making the decision and a few days later learn that something quite bad happened. Add in the bonus of not having passengers be annoyed at the neighbour chatting away at the phone, and the passengers being more attentive during takeoff/landing.
- sciguy77 13y agoSkymall is fucked.
- btbuildem 13y agoSuch a bunk rule anyways. If there was the remotest chance of a phone / kindle / whatever interfering with in-flight systems, bringing any electronics onboard would be expressly forbidden. They'd take them away from you at the security screening (like they do with the extremely dangerous water bottles and nail clippers these days..)
- bitops 13y agoAs long as they never allow anyone to talk on their cellphone during flights, I'm happy.