Interfering With Flight?

By CHRISTINE NEGRONI
NYT
Published: January 17, 2011

The announcement over the plane’s speaker seems as much a part of the routine before takeoff as the demonstration of how to buckle a seat belt: Please turn off all electronic devices.

But some passengers invariably ignore the request, perhaps thinking that their iPods or e-books do not count. And really, does it matter if the devices are left on?

The answer, it turns out, is that sometimes it may.

“It’s a good news-bad news thing,” said David Carson, an engineer with Boeing. Electronic devices do not cause problems in every case, he said. “And that’s good,” he said. “It’s bad in that people assume it never will.”

Passengers are taking an increasing array of devices on board planes — cellphones, tablets, GPS units and more. Many of these devices transmit a signal, and all of them emit electromagnetic waves, which, in theory, could interfere with the plane’s electronics. At the same time, older planes might not have the best shielding against the latest generation of devices, some engineers said.

“Is it worrisome?” asked Bill Strauss, an engineer who studied passenger use of electronic devices several years ago. “It is.”

(More here.)