Originally Posted by
greggwiggins
A followup to my earlier post,
bsmooth1; an
electronics engineering technical journal article containing the results of the authors' own study of interference by consumer electronics and some of the anecdotal evidence collected by NASA through that agency's Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS). Aircrew can anonymously report potential safety problems to the ASRS.
For example:
"In one telling incident, a flight crew stated that a 30-degree navigation error was immediately corrected after a passenger turned off a DVD player and that the error reoccurred when the curious crew asked the passenger to switch the player on again. Game electronics and laptops were the culprits in other reports in which the crew verified in the same way that a particular PED caused erratic navigation indications."
In all, quoting again from the article on aircraft instrumentation interference by personal electronic devices,
"we found 125 entries in the ASRS database that reported PED interference. Of these, 77 were considered highly correlated, based on the description of observed PED use and interference occurrence. The reports included cases of critical aircraft systems such as navigation and throttle settings being affected."
Here is a link to a sample set of 50 reports from the NASA ASRS database regarding Personal Electronic Devices. While many are just cabin crew reports of pax refusing to turn off devices with no apparent ill effects and some overheating batteries, a few indicate actual interference of one sort or another. The entire database is searchable
here.
Originally Posted by
gglave
Largely it's because the takeoff and landing are the most dangerous part of the flight
Not only that, but critical systems such as ILS are only used during landing. Most of the concern is with navigation and communication equipment, not the computers and electronics that actually keep the plane in the air. And or course, if you are off by a few hundred feet at cruise, not as big a deal as being off that far on landing.