Originally Posted by
planemechanic
I think you mean "unsubstantiated claims" about interference are submitted regularly.
I mean exactly what I said. Few, if any, of the incidents are investigated further.
As a pilot, I would say that more than half of the avionics write ups that I see in the aircraft logbooks are not reproducible by the mechanics and are subsequently written up multiple times before the mechanics are able to get it fixed. Does that mean that the three, four, etc., previous anomalies were the pilot's imagination? No, it means that these things are unpredictable and very difficult to reproduce.
Without proper testing equipment on board and someone to perform those tests all you are left with is an unsubstantiated claim, not evidence.
Yet they continue to occur, again, and again, and again. From that you conclude that they do not exist.
If cell phones were such a risk to avionics equipment they would also be banned from all maintenance hangars where such certification testing occurred.
The only risk of using a cell phone during maintenance work is that an otherwise perfectly good airplane will fail a diagnostic test and the mechanics will waste time trying to find the non-existent problem.
even though you, as a pilot, are relying on those certifications to ensure that your equipment is working properly.
Ah, that's the key to why the airplanes aren't crashing. We don't rely on the equipment working properly, we expect it to fail so that we are prepared on the relatively rare occasions that it does.
This pretty much throws out the window the concept that the ban on cell phones is anything other than an outmoded "safety" concept.
Re-read what I wrote on risk-management.
Again, pretty much throws this concern out the window.
One successful test only shows that everything was working correctly on that airplane, on that flight. One test doesn't tell you anything about what can happen when things aren't working perfectly. If a successful test ensured perfect performance then there would never be any write-ups. Everything always works fine--until it doesn't.