Wi-Fi Shown To Interfere With Aircraft Systems

lukehopewell1 writes "It's official: using Wi-Fi on a plane can interfere with a pilot's navigational equipment, according to airline equipment manufacturers Honeywell Avionics and Boeing today. Boeing confirmed to ZDNet Australia that the issue does exist, but said it has not delivered any planes suffering the fault. 'Blanking of the Phase 3 Display Units has been reported during airline EMI (electromagnetic interference) certification testing of wireless broadband systems on various Next-Generation 737 aeroplanes,' Boeing said."

Epic Fail

[raymansean]

How in the world are new devices developed and approved for production that ignore the possibility of EMI from portable devices? There are no excuses for such negligence.

How can this be allowed?

[meerling]

Any plane with such crappy EM shielding is a scary thing and shouldn't be in the air with or near people.

Re:This is a non-story

[vawwyakr]

This is just another example of how (inexplicably to me at least) companies want to continue fear based rules that just don't make sense. It's like the whole "don't use your cell phone near the gas pump" BS that they tried to spread for a long time. Even when tests and common sense says there's no way a cell phone would cause a spark that would ignite gas fumes unless some catastrophic (and extremely rare) occurred.

Re:Just an FYI

[MozeeToby]

By that logic half the words in the average English speaker's vocabulary aren't "English words".