747Focal I can appreciate your dislike for the "prissy" attitude that some folks take toward air safety. Certainly the quest to sanitize everything can be overdone.
On the other hand, your anecdotal experience, even a lot of it, doesn't count for much either. Who is to say that there might not be a problem under slightly different circumstances?
I've had the (anecdotal) experience of instrumentation and inflight computing systems shutting down or at least limping for awhile from TWX and sunspots and mil radar sweeps, microwave relays, AM and FM antenna towers and misbehaving onboard systems. Except for the focussed beams and galactic things, distance is the key, thanks to the 1/Rcube dissipation of power over distance from a source radiating in all directions, so a teensy cellphone in the forward lav really can hit you harder than a loosely aimed monster jammer ten miles away.
The long-term resolution of this issue is to require that individual air carrier aircraft and their systems be certified to a specific level of electromagnetic radiation tolerance, taking into account the various electonic toys that may be found in use in the main cabin. While this would cost some real money, it wouldn't have to be an extremely expensive or difficult procedure and would give a needed level of confidence in an area of growing "sensitivity". Wouldn't need to be done that often, either.
In the meantime, common sense does often work wonders.
Last edited by arcniz; 2nd May 2003 at 14:51.