Technology and old wives’ tales

Ever since the earliest days of portable consumer electronics, with the appearance of the Walkman in the early 1980s, and probably even before, we have become used to being told as we readied for take off aboard a plane: “please turn off all electronic devices during takeoff and landing.”

The requirement was based on the supposed interference with the electronics of the plane, and that supposedly were a danger to us all. But the alleged interference has never been shown: either in flight, or much less under laboratory conditions. In the entire history of commercial aviation, there has never been a single report of an aircraft suffering any kind of problem due to passengers’ electronic devices.

Over time and with the spread of electronic devices, the requirement is no longer a matter of caution: it is simply ridiculous. Thousands of passengers forget to disconnect their cellphones or simply refuse to do so, and yet nothing ever happens. The unwarranted anger displayed by some cabin crew contrasts occasionally with the tolerance show by a few others prepared to look the other way, while the number of passengers shooting daggers at you as though you were a terrorist simply because you continued reading your Kindle or took a snap of the view out of the window has gradually reduced.

Even so, there are still those who insist that the ban makes sense. Here are a few of the choicer arguments:

• “I am an engineer, so shut up, because you don’t know what you’re talking about…” “and the common mode differential amplifiers? and the ferrite core standard? Yeah, right. But sorry, NO. Some engineers like to multiply security limits by 30 as a rule, but this doesn’t mean that something isn’t absurd and makes no sense.
• “I know of a case where a pilot had to take steps because the interference was terrible…” Yes, that’s right, he told a cousin of your friend’s brother in law, and it wasn’t true.
• “It’s a rule, and rules are there to be obeyed…” NO, rules are supposed to make sense, and when they don’t, we change them.
• “It isn’t possible to check everybody’s devices to see which ones interfere, so it is simpler to make everybody turn theirs off…” NO, what makes more sense is to take notice of the evidence that shows that no consumer electronic device emits interference, and stop talking nonsense.
• “Safety must come first…” Right. In which case, worry about safety, and NOT about nonsense that we have known for years.
• “What’s the big deal about turning your device off for a few minutes?” True, it’s no big deal, but is pretty stupid, and stupidity is well, stupid.
• “Haven’t you heard how a speaker makes a noise if you turn a cellphone on close up to it?” That’s right, it makes a noise. But it has nothing to do with interfering the instruments of a commercial aircraft.

Etc., etc., etc., ad nauseam. A few more can be found in old entries of my blog in Spanish, such as here, as well as here, and here, too.

Today, at long last, the US FAA has released a press note saying that it will allow the use of electronic devices at all times aboard aircraft. Even so, it’s going to take quite a while before we can use our devices during landing and take off: we can expect an absurdly long period of supposed testing of every single airplane and ever single kind of electronic device in every single country and by every single airline, which if nothing else will demonstrate their reaction time and concern for the wellbeing of their passengers.

The important thing here isn’t that we won’t have to interrupt our Kindle reading, or now be able to take snapshots or read our mail… what will be really interesting to measure will be how long these old wives tales, these superstitions and urban myths take to disappear. In the case of electronic devices it has been quite a few decades involving absurd restrictions in the face of hard evidence to the contrary; inertia based on a lunatic respect for a supposedly unquestionable authority. The evidence has been out there for years:

“The hard truth is, that despite years of studies by both the British CAA and the United States NASA, no negative effect on airliner safety has ever been found as a result of the use of cell phones on an airliner, by passengers in the cabin.”

But when all is said and done, in this case we could point to attenuating factors to avoid a possible error: cabin crew have simply been doing their job (and their irritation could, on occasions, be the result of some passengers’ attitudes), while no civil aviation authority wanted to be responsible just in case, even though nothing had ever happened, something did happen.

The important thing to remember about technology, due to its rapid development, is that we need to be mentally flexible enough to be able to ignore the old wives’ tales, and not try to justify the unjustifiable, and to pay attention to science. What happens all too often, as Arthur C. Clarke explained in his third law, is that technology, when sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from magic. For each new technological advance, there will always be old wives out there with tales warning of the terrible consequences of taking them up: the horrible and painful deaths that trains will provoke in passengers whose internal organs are subjected to high speeds, or the devastating explosions that will rip through gas stations if we use our cellphone while filling up, or the horrendous tumors that WiFi will produce in our babies, or the hordes of brain dead generations exposed to the internet…

Learning to spot the old wives and their tales is a useful practice, a very useful one.