With "ionagh" info in mind.
Lets imagine the First/Business pax seated in seat 1A on a 747.
Seat 1A pax has a laptop with blue tooth and wifi on
A palm pilot wifi enabled to sinc with laptop
A mobile phone switched on due to what ever reason.
Top of decent all pax told to turn off electronic devices and pack them away.
Seat 1A waits till being told twice to do so and throws all of the above devices still switched on into carry on luggage and places in the forward coat locker less than 6 inches away from all 3 ILS antenna which is mounted on the other side of the bulk head.
Do we really know if this will effect the system or not?
Probably not if the antenna shielding is intact but it may be chaffed and getting worse with an intermittant defect the engineers can't find.
Then on the day a full cat 3 landing in pea soup is required seat 1A pax has done the above, the ILS antenna shielding has given out.
Next thing we are reading about controlled flight into terrain.
Aircraft incidents do not happen due to one failure they happen due to multiple failures, or as risk management people say, when the holes in the swiss cheese line up.
If pax in seat 74 B did the same with their electronic devices and placed them in the locker adjacent door 5 left, they may cause un commanded flushing of the vacuum toilets, no big deal but when seat 1A does it its catastrophic
Perhaps this is why one rule for all. Turn your phones off
Something else to add. GPS landing systems will be comming into vogue more and more. GPS radio waves operate around the 1.5 Gigahertz range which is close to the mobile phone frequency.
Last edited by Bolty McBolt; 7th Aug 2006 at 05:56.