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Comment by miramba | Hacker News Reader

Sounds disturbing, but when I think about the thousands of flights, 100000s of passengers, almost all with at least 1 LiIon device…a lot more incidents should have happened at this point.

Semi-related story: I started a flight from a not-1st world country to another not-1st in the times when all cell phones had to be switched off. When we approached landing, the cellphones got contact and started buzzing and ringing with incoming messages. Apparently a lot of people had ignored the order to turn off the phone. I realized that in my 1st world, people follow those orders, in other countries they just don‘t. If cell phones posed a danger to flight safety, somewhere a plane should have crashed already. Similar to here.

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I don't want this discussion to devolve into an FAA radio interference flame war but the risk from general consumer electronic/mobile devices on airplanes has been minimal and most instruments are well shielded against RF interference.

I would suspect most seasoned and knowledgeable pilots don't worry too much about Mr Businessman in first class on his iPhone or Tablet using 5G.

On the other hand I have seen more than one flight attendant absolutely lose their marbles because someone was texting during announcements or while taxiing.

Aside from the fact that someone talking on their phone during a flight would be terribly annoying, the biggest issue with active phones on airplanes was how it messed with ground cell towers. There was fair amount of handoff the towers had to do with traveling passengers at 30,000 feet. At least in the earlier days it was problematic to deal with. I'd love a wireless communications engineer to chime in on that part.

What is your proposition here? That these incidents aren't actually occurring as reported, or that in air fires just aren't a big deal? Eventually such a fire will end in a disaster, we're really just playing with probability. In aviation a lot of investment is made in mitigating much less likely problems, but we seem to be happy to accept the proliferation of potentially dangerous devices I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but it is interesting.

Obligatory XKCD https://xkcd.com/651/

> If cell phones posed a danger to flight safety,

... the demand to have them be switched off or put on airplane mode would've been stringently controlled. It's mostly an FCC issue where a mobile device flying above would try to connect to many base stations.

If the airlines really care, they can tell passengers that leaving the phone radio on will drain their batteries hard as the devices will be desperately trying to regain connectivity, that would get many people to turn these things off/onto airplane mode.

"I get what you're saying about seat belts. But when I think about all the hours I've driven, the thousands upon thousands of miles ... something should have happened by this point."

If cell phones posed a danger to flight safety, somewhere a plane should have crashed already. Similar to here.

The logic here seems to be: "Factor X turned out to be a false alarm. Therefore this new factor Y you're talking about -- completely unrelated to X -- well, it's probably a false alarm as well."

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