Originally Posted by
NY-FLA
I didn't say the pax were gullible. I said the airlines thought the pax were gullible. At least a few of us pax can't help but see right through the arm-waving, window dressing hysteria and paranoia that passes for "safety" at the airlines. Read carefully the comment about the Boeing engineers who were appropriately disdainful of anyone who thought they would design or put up for certification an aircraft that was susceptible to failure from EMF interference from a regular cell-phone.
And contrast that with the safety regulators who thought that is exactly what had happened.
Hmmm. Must have been off harrumphing while my laptop went through this process, as a piece of "electrical equipment used on board". And yes, I know most are FCC certified as having limited emissions, but at the level of confidence you seem to be promulgating, you would need to be have each laptop re-certified before every flight. Who knows what modifications those untrustworthy pax have made to their laptops between flights? Who knows if the pax is carrying a non-FCC certified electronic device?
Hyperbole. If you want to have a serious discussion on this, it doesn't become you. But I guess on this you know better than everyone else.
Before you go further at spreading this ill-conceived risk avoidance philosophy, it would help to explain where exactly cell phones or other transmitting devices have been shown, not "implicated", shown to cause problems with flight ops. And because a pilot said it was so, does not make it so.
What the 'ill-conceived risk avoidance philosophy' which is the foundation of good flight safety programmes everywhere?
You should be grateful there are professionals who hold the philosophy I've espoused, otherwise your flying would be a lot more dangerous!
Tell you what, you obsess about safety issues that have never happened, I'll obsess about why, in more than one recent case that involved real fatalities, the pilots couldn't remember that nose down might just help them recover from an aerodynamic stall.
And those safety issues which you dismiss as 'never having happened' haven't happened precisely because of the proactive approach to safety where risks are controlled because they are identified - in advance of accidents happening.
It is interesting to note though, that in that birdstrike example I gave above, it was predicted that the incidence of multiple engine strikes with large flocking birds would increase and that's why engine certification tolerances had to be increased. About 10 years after the regulators had recognised that there was an increased risk, the Hudson river incident happened - precisely the kind of incident the regulators had been concerned about, and for which newer generations of planes are now better designed to withstand. Sadly, with the life span of a plan lasting 20-30 years, it isn't always possible for the problems to come in the planes which have been designed with recent issues in mind. If the plane involved in the Hudson had had engines certificated in the last 10 years, then the pilot wouldn't have had to show amazing piloting skills - the plane would still be airbourne and still flying as the engines would likely have tolerated what they had to ingest.
I don't want to live in a world where idiots get to ignore safety requirements because its inconvenient to them, and dismiss proactive safety management because they want to see dead bodies to see that the risk is real. That there is a group of flyers who will only give up their phones upon the deaths of others is one of the most selfish things I've ever heard of - if it was only them who would die if they are wrong then I'd be much more blase about it, as that would be Darwin in action. Sadly, it won't be.