The FAA OK's cell phones in flight, the Senate tries to make it illegal

[thewayne]

While I appreciate the ability to use electronics on a plane, aircrafts are hyper-noisy environments as is, the thought of someone behind me talking endlessly on their phone really has no appeal. Usually I'm wearing a pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones and I just sleep or play sudoku or do crosswords on my Nintendo DS Lite.

...two U.S. Senators, Lamar Alexander (R-TN) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), have proposed legislation to ban cell phone calls while aboard an airplane. This follows a recent announcement from the FAA increasing the range of electronic gadgets travelers can use while flying, and a vote by the FCC to consider allowing phone calls during flight. However, even as those government agencies work to lift regulations on in-flight technology, the Department of Transportation is pondering a in-flight call ban of its own, saying it might not be "fair" to consumers to have to listen to other passengers talk on the phone throughout a long flight. FCC commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel said, "If we move beyond what we do here today and actually update our rules to allow voice calls on planes we can see a future where our quiet time is monetized and seating in the silent section comes at a premium."

I appreciate that it is a bill of bipartisan origin, but the FAA ruling opened a can of worms and if the bill makes it out of committee, I have great faith that the teabaggers are going to start talking about the "gubmint stomping on our rights!". The problem is that people are much less reasonable in their public behavior these days, especially with phones, and if unfettered phone use happens on planes I expect to see an increase in air rage incidents.

http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/13/12/13/1641231/senators-propose-bill-prohibiting-phone-calls-on-planes

Comments

[moiraj.livejournal.com]

I rarely use my cell and never around other people, so I have to ask: Is it really necessary to shout into the phone like that? Because that's half the issue, how loudly people speak.

Flying is stressful enough without having to listen to that racket, and everyone will get ticked off, and the flight attendants will end up with even more difficult jobs.

And aren't people's rights kind of suspended when it comes to anything involving planes?

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

From what I understand, the reason why people shout in to a cell phone is the absence of the background noise of a wired phone. You think the connection has gone dead, so people speak louder. And I would think that speaking more loudly takes more concentration, so you ignore more of what's going on around you.

Here, some constitutional rights are suspended when it comes to any form of public conveyance travel, starting from airports and bus stations and water ports, especially within 100 miles of international borders, which covers something like 80%+ of the population. For example, once you enter an airport screening checkpoint line, you can't leave it. Your rights to free speech are curtailed, your right to search and seizure, etc.

Talking on a cell phone has been banned because early cell phones were pretty crude in terms of the amount of radio noise they generated and they interfered with the aircraft's navigation and control systems. New cells have really cleaned up their transmitters to emit less noise as part of an efficiency drive to use less power and get more signal users in to crowded bandwidth allotments, and with improvements in avionics systems, the FAA says that now they don't interfere. So it wasn't federal law that prohibited the use of electronics on aircraft, it was Federal Aviation Administration regulations, which have now been changed.

The other advance in technology was in-aircraft electronics that created signal relays so that your phone could actually make connections. This is a two-part problem. First, the transmitter in your phone is really weak to extend battery life, which is why you see so many cell phone towers and increasing numbers in higher population density areas. So a signal from 40,000 feet isn't going to hit towers very well. Second, the cell towers themselves hand-off calls between towers as you move to load-balance: if Tower A is approaching its limit and some of the signal traffic can be handed off to B which has little load, people's calls shift to B and they never know it, this applies to voice, text, and data. So you're flying along at 40,000 feet at 600 MPH, covering a mile every six seconds. If you just amplify the cell signal to hit the ground, you're hitting a wide swath of towers and then switching between them very rapidly, which the system just couldn't handle, so the other technical hurdle was to improve the infrastructure of the switching network.

There were some big technical hurdles to overcome, and unfortunately, they've overcome them and now we're going to add mass stress to an already stressful event.

[silveradept]

I can definitely see that air rage uptick, considering air flight already removes the idea of personal space when sitting in coach. I'm sure the airlines will figure out rules if the government relaxes theirs.