I am glad to see forget chip in with some experience. A decade ago I was chatting about Elaine Scarry's proposal that TWA 800 might have been brought down by stray radiation from a nearby P3 with a colleague of mine in the Physics department. He supposed that it all depended on how well-cooked the U.S. Navy likes its airplane crews.
Originally Posted by brider
.... but what about chips on pumps, valves, etc., out on the engines which, as somebody pointed out, are not really Faraday cages...
People have said all kinds of silly things on this thread and this may be one. Check the picture earlier on this thread (or some other) of the box in which the EEC sits on the engine. A better Faraday cage you will not see, unless it's an airplane hull.
Please also note, as bsieker and others have repeatedly pointed out, that any purported EM explosion left no visible traces in a highly-instrumented system!
Engineers who deal with electromagnetic radiation have spent most of their education learning how to stop the bits they work on being influenced by EM radiation from bits other people have worked on (or the sun, or more recently the background radiation from the earth and from cosmic rays). It's been like that now for, dare I say it, over a century. It didn't start with the invention of cell phones!
Please see forget's next post for a link to an EM test cell operated by QinetiQ. Note (a) how big the kit is, and (b) how close to the aircraft it must be to get suitable field strengths. Take it seven hundred feet away (the altitude of the purportedly affected aircraft) and it is going to have to be at least 50 times the power of what you see in the brochure, which amongst other things means a lot larger.
I believe some sort of EM interference testing of this sort is a requirement for aircraft certification, but I can't actually put my hands on either the requirements or on any B777 EM testing history at the moment.
PBL