Airport security: Should I have been allowed to board with this?

Careful. They're monitoring your email!

 

I bet 9 out of 10 passengers on board a plane carry RF transmitters (transcievers)... isn't that what a cell phone is?

 

Not to mention the fob on your keychain that unlocks your car.

 

Why not?

A friend who just got back from the sandbox told me that's a common way that insurgents use to detonate IED's.

 

I once went through JFK and was stopped by security because of one of those "slim-as-a-credit-card" pocket utility thingies that happened to have a short knife in it... It was immediately recognized in the x-ray machine and they explained I could not take it on board...

...the funny part is, when the guy came over to me and we went off to a table on the side to work things out, he asked to see my wallet and when I gave it to him, he proceeded to open it and search for the utility thing... The second he opened it, my big, thin silver knife fell right out and he didn't even pay attention to that - and it went completely unnoticed through the x-ray machine...!!! I couldn't believe it... While he was standing right there, I grabbed my knife and put it in my pocket and had no trouble until it was spotted by security in the CA airport when I was on my way back home...

 

About 20 years ago I flew back East and took my RC car along, and the security made me turn the thing on and show them how it worked before they would let me take it with me. Did they not check to see if you had any fuel in the tank or at least verify that the transmitter controled your helo? You must not have been a likely suspect to create any concern.

 

Cell phones are intentional transmitters as mentioned, so are wireless lan ports in laptops. Unintentional transmitters are DVD players, portable video games, etc.

Any of these CAN interfere with aircraft avionics (navigation systems). But it is not certain. The emissions frequencies of these devices are not intentionally in the same band as aircraft devices, but spurious emissions are possible and they can fall into the aircraft bands. This is why aircraft currently restrict device operation below 10,000 feet. The idea is that those are critical phases of flight and any navigation disruption would be less recoverable. I once had to tell a woman next to me to "shut your d*** cellphone off, before you kill us" as she started making a call to someone as we were at 500' and descending into SFO in fog (the pilots have NO visuals and only work with the nav systems for that kind of approach).

I've been tracking aviation safety reports on this issue on a sporadic basis and there is still no "smoking gun", but several incidents have been reported where passenger devices were found to affect nav systems. Despite this, the FAA is considering permitting the use of cell phones in flight for passenger convenience. The problem with this is two-fold: 1) as more transmitters are in operation, you get more intermodulation products (that is a technical term for frequencies mixing with each other to create new frequencies, so if two cellphones individually didn't interfere, both operating at the same time could create a frequency that does interfere), and 2) passengers are even more likely to forget to turn their cellphones off during the critical sub-10K' altitudes. This is an air-crash waiting to happen.

As far as terrorists are concerned, a hidden intentional transmitter in the avionics band IS a threat, either on the ground or by a suicide passenger.

BTW, if the FAA did permit cellphones in flight, it would not be coordinated with the FCC. Surprisingly, the FCC also forbids cellphone use in the air. The FCC has an entirely different reason for not wanting cellphones on during flight. The problem is that the cell system is designed so that a single cellphone only reaches a few cell towers at a time, when someone is in the air, they can see many times more cell towers than they can on the ground. Hence, use of cellphones in the air can overload the cell system.

 

my son had to throw away a toy sword at the Orlando airport because security wouldn't let him carry it on. Inside the terminal they were selling toy Aladdin swords at the gift shop! WTF?

 

Pete,
So you've got this stuff in your carry-on?
Whatever you do, don't try flying the copter around inside the plane, o.k.?
You'd get into trouble, for sure.

 

Not just me!!!!
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Cell phones are a watt to 2 watts at most. Right now it's a liability scare, thousands of flights take place with cell phone callers doing so any way every day, and so far I know of NO crash or even incident that can be tied to their use.

You actually gave the reason they are restricted, the hop time between towers is far too long, and exposure + 500mph travel can overload many towers qite quickly.

 

The SOL has expired, but I once quite by accident brought my Gerber 3&1/2" folding knife onboard the plane. My pockets were empty of everything else but I simply forgot I have the knife on me.

Strolled right through the metal detector, and was waved on through.

As an expiriment I brought it on the return flight, again waved right through.

Feel safer?

 

Jeeze! Last time I flew I had to surrender my nail clipper..."Nobody move, or I'll clip the pilots nails!! Don't make me prove that I'm serious!!!" YA!

Artherd gets to bring a 3 1/2" knife and Peter gets to bring a goddam helicopter on board.
Where's the consistency?

 

A watt or two within proximity of the nav electronics is a lot. But it's not the intentional emissions that are the issue, it is the spurious ones - 30-40dB down at the right frequency at micro-watt levels is what matters.

Check out this month's issue of Spectrum regarding some emissions surveys done by a research team. Also includes some stories - portable DVD player that caused a 30 degree error in a nav receiver and a Samsung cellphone model (SPH-N300) that caused GPS receivers to lose lock (we are heading to GPS & WAAS approaches). There were also 125 incidents reported in the ASRS (Aviation Safety Reporting System) database of personal devices interfering with nav systems.

Just because there isn't a smoking gun doesn't mean it isn't an issue. The problem is that there is NO formal electromagnetic interference/susceptibility testing between personal devices and avionics. So long as that is the case, permitting operation is an accident waiting to happen.

 

Couple of new bits of info I came across today on cell phones in aircraft:

Crossair flight LX 498, which crashed just after take-off from Zurich airport on 10 January 2000

Report by CAA on mobile phone signal levels in aircraft

"5.6 From the above, by comparing the test results with the qualification levels given in Section 2, it
can be seen that interference levels produced by a portable telephone, used near the flight deck or
avionics equipment bay, will exceed demonstrated susceptibility levels for equipment qualified to
standards published prior to July 1984. Since equipment qualified to these standards are installed in older
aircraft, and can be installed (and is known to be installed) in newly built aircraft, current policy for
restricting the use of portable telephones on all aircraft will need to remain in force."

I would add that Mythbusters just did a show on cellphones in aircraft and demonstrated interference in some circumstances, but it's not worth using as a supporting reference since they made several mistakes.

 

Oh, don't worry, they made me give up my nail clipper on that same flight (yes I'm serious...)

 

I can certinly agree with you here.

I'll go one step furthur, this will only get worse, and is why we need MANY different and redundant nav systems. Why we have to keep VORs and even NDBs and the like, while putting GPS in every plane too.