I swear, sometimes I think FA's, especially on the regionals, just make stuff up.

Recently had a SkyWest (ERJ-175, I think) FA inform all of us up front that those little bottles of water had to be consumed before take off or stowed in our carry-ons. They were NOT to be left out in plain sight or stowed in the seat back pockets.

The guy next to me in 4D had head phones on, missed this little speech and had put his bottle in the seat back pocket.

Sure enough, as we were taxiing, she informed him of the errors of his ways. After she left, the guy looked at me an asked if that was a new rule. I just pointed to the one liter Aquafina bottle in the seatback of 4A and shrugged my shoulders.

Trout

Santa gives the brains to those who execute six sigma engineering of safety on planes, instead of internet intellectuals trying to argue stuff they don't know anything about.

We enjoy the safety of airlines because of these people and not because of the people trying out logic as a new tool.

You can google plenty of instances of interference of electronics with avionics to your hearts' content.

Cellphones and electronics can easily turn themselves on just by being tossed around in luggage or by being crammed in a tight economy seat. My blackberry was famous for turning itself on. An aircraft would never be certified if a powered up cellphone would bring it down. If the pilot is getting interference in his headset then oh well. You can blame that on our antiquated ATC system. It should all be text based and hopefully one day they will finannoy get the NextGen system in place.

You might have a point if we were flying around in DC-3's with primitive instruments. My iPhone isn't going to bring the 777 to its knees. :)

Ill try to keep this simple.

What airline safety engineering ISNT

Finding the root cause of what causes crashes and then passing regs saying DONT DO THAT.

What it is

Identifying the cascade of 6 things that all contributed to the crash, understanding them, and then passing regs to make them more difficult to occur.

Your iPhone will not crash a 777 or a DC3 correct. But the interference of a CDMA, or a 3G, 4G LTE bluetooth, Wifi phone, maybe jailbreaked and operating out of design specs makes it difficult to understand how avionics might be compromised and certainly very costly to test. There are far too many scenarios that have to be considered to achieve six sigma safety than having pax turn on their phones and say "Look, no crashes"

Stop trying to inject facts into this rant, dammit! These people want their toys! ;)

I'm just saying I don't think the FAA would have changed their minds if they didn't think it would be safe. I'm pretty sure they took into account grandma who doesn't know how to put her phone in 'airplane mode'. If you are really that concerned then maybe you should petition NASA to conduct a test. If they are crazy enough to fly into a hurricane then surely they'd be willing to load up 200 cell phones and see what happens. Hell I'd be willing to donate to the test just to put this nonsense to rest.

Myth Busters tested the theory and could find nothing wrong with using your cell phone.

Most likely in this case the operator told the FAA that they would collect any service items before taxi and takeoff. Each operator is different. If you tell the FAA that and a cabin safety inspector is onboard and sees the rules your said you were going to enforce were not, it is a fine. If you brought in your own bottle, it is not a service item as it was not handed out by the crew.

It's scary how people consume information in this age. Achieving six sigma safety performance vs a TV show.....ill get back to ypu on that after I've processed it a bit.