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Flight Attendant Technophobia
The Travel Technologist · February 8, 1999

Maybe they've inhaled too much recycled cabin air or indulged once too often in the prepackaged gruel they serve us for dinner, but something is making flight crews behave erratically around electronics.

That's the point of most responses to last week's column pondering which gadgets are - and aren't - safe to run on a commercial flight.

For example:

- A Delta Air Lines flight attendant forced passenger Barry Lewis to power down his calculator while the plane was waiting on the tarmac. "I pointed out to her that it had no 'off' switch because it was solar-powered so she insisted I had to 'hide it in the dark so it would go off,'" he recalls.

- Bill Thorne tried to erase his pager messages while his United Airlines flight sat at the gate on a weather delay. "The flight attendant saw me and made a bee-line to my seat," he says. "She indicated that all electronic equipment needed to be turned off and stowed. I am not one to argue, but I pointed out that we were not moving, much less taking off or flying, and that I was just erasing messages, not sending or receiving. Obviously, pagers rank right up there with pipe bombs and anthrax, because she threatened to get the captain."

- Waiting to take off from Helsinki on a Finnair flight, Andy Key decided to check voicemail on his mobile phone "when the Stasi stewardess made a big song and dance about turning it off. I gently reminded her that the aircraft engines were turned off and the captain wasn't even on the plane, but she made a grab for my phone and called another stewardess over. Despite my front row, business class, gold card status, and my reasoned argument backed up by a fair understanding of the rules and the technology, I was treated like a hijacker."

- A quarter of the way through Josh Head's recent flight from Boston, a flight attendant ordered two teenagers across the aisle to turn off a laser pointer. "She said she was unsure if the device could interfere with the aircraft in some way," he reports. "I snickered and pondered how a beam of light generated by a single AA battery could interfere with flight controls."

- With 15 minutes before his scheduled departure from Newark, passenger Joe Fink wanted to catch up on a few e-mails. "Almost as soon as I turned my laptop on, I was asked by the flight attendant to turn it off because it 'could interfere with the navigation equipment.' I pointed out that we were still on the ground at the terminal. Her only reply was a firm 'those are the rules.'"

Did someone say rules? I checked to see if the crewmembers were overreacting. I figured I owed it to readers like Kathy Sweeney, a flight attendant who wrote to say that she "took offense" to my article.

"The main reason that we have you turn off your portable electronic devices prior to takeoff has nothing to do with whether the plane will blow up or not," she insisted. "It has everything to do with safety. If your laptop is out, with your tray table down, you are blocking the exit of the people that are in your row. If you are listening to a tape or CD player during takeoff, if something happens and we need to evacuate, you will not hear the evacuation commands."

In some of the cases cited earlier, I can see her point. But a majority of the incidents described by readers suggest that flight attendants don't understand technology or the Federal Aviation Administration rules regulating it. Which, once you take a look at the four-page FAA advisory circular on the subject, is understandable.

As I read it, the government prohibits the operation of FM receivers, including CB radios, cellular phones and remote control devices on commercial flights. It essentially leaves the operation of so-called portable electronic devices up to the airlines -- specifically the pilot-in-command. The circular recommends that all gadgets be turned off below 10,000 feet, notably "during the takeoff and landing phases of the flight."

Flight attendant Scott Wells notes that there's a good reason for the policy. "As far as laptops and other devices being used during taxi, takeoff, and landing, these objects can become projectiles," he warns.

Since the FAA leaves the enforcement of its recommendations to carriers, your flight attendants have broad powers to confiscate an offending gizmo at their discretion and punish you by asking the pilot to summon a federal marshal to meet you at the gate. Ignoring a flight attendant's instructions, however misguided, can be tantamount to interfering with a crew - a federal offense.

I don't think it's unfair to characterize some of the flight attendant behavior as strange, and perhaps a little ignorant, as it relates to in-flight electronics. Nor is it unreasonable to say that the really troublesome gadgets are getting overlooked.

A good example of the confusion comes from traveler Mike Janay.

Flying from Johannesburg to New York, he reported three separate confrontations with cabin crewmembers over his headset. "One flight attendant asked whether it was a tape or CD player. I lied and told her it was a tape. She said that was OK, but a CD player can cause a crash - not just during takeoff or landing, but at anytime during the flight. I didn't stop listening."

A second flight attendant approached him a while later and asked him to turn his tape player off because it could interfere with the navigational equipment. The third one came by a short while later to ask if he could borrow one of his CDs.

"I told him about the other two attendants, and he told me that there are really no rules, and the flight crew can allow or disallow anything they want," says Janay.

Funny. But what about the really dangerous electronics, like the cigarette-lighter adapters, that could potentially be used to recharge one of those explosive Lithium-Ion batteries?

"Running laptops off in-seat power is fine as long as the plane is properly wired for it, but recharging Lithium-Ion batteries is a little scary, given their occasional propensity to burst into flames while charging," wrote BusinessWeek technology columnist Steve Wildstrom. "Unfortunately, the way most laptops are designed, there's no way to do one without the other unless you physically remove the battery from the laptop."

Perhaps even more frightening is that experts can't agree on which electronic devices will interfere with a plane's navigational systems. There's no shortage of incidents to read at NASA's Aviation Safety Reporting System Home Page.

Reader Phil Wood witnessed a Federal Communications Commission test of a new PC laptop a few years ago. The results were troubling.

"In a Faraday chamber, the new laptop was tested under a variety of configurations, and it was passing with flying colors," he remembers. "Inadvertently, the laptop was dropped on the floor. No external damage. So it was powered back up. Now, however, it radiated in excess of the FCC limit: a connector had jarred loose and an impedance mismatch had been created."

He concludes, "too bad neither the grizzled veteran pilots nor the despotic flight attendants have the foggiest clue about electromagnetic interference, what causes it, and what frequency bands are critical."

Other than determining that a couple of flight attendants suffer from a mild case of technophobia, I'm afraid we can't draw any tidy conclusions on the issue of in-flight electronics. Hate to use a cliché, but when it comes to airline travel, I tend to side with the crewmembers: it's better to be safe than sorry.

Christopher Elliott is a travel commentator based in Annapolis, Md. All e-mailed questions may be edited, condensed or republished at the site's discretion. The Travel Technologist appears weekly on this site. This story was also published on Biztravel.com.