Mobile Phones on Aircraft

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      The use of mobile phones on aircraft is generally forbidden during flight. One reason given for this is that the mobile phone could interfere with the sensitive equipment on the aircraft. This could be restated as "during development these aircraft were not designed to accept signals from mobile phones and there has not been sufficient testing to be sure that they could" as can be seen from plans to improve certification. ome level of electromagnetic interference is theoretically possible from active radio transmitters such as mobile phones on aircraft. Exactly how much and in what way is dependent on the particular phone system in use and the plane component in question. Whether that level of interference should have any influence on electronic systems which should be designed to fly through lightning storms without falling out of the sky is an entirely different question.

     One area in which interference would be most likely is in the radio-based audio equipment used for voice communications between the aeroplane and the ground. The mobile phone transmitter is much closer to the receiver on the aircraft than the ground station, but operates at a lower power than the ground station.

      Some mobile phone systems such as GSM may cause an irritating buzz (explained in the TDMA article) which would certainly disrupt communications from the pilot to ground. The high speed of air travel may make interference more likely than it would otherwise be. The maximum speed of travel in a mobile phone system is limited by several factors, frequency changes, rate of change of timing offset, etc. The speed of an aeroplane often exceeds these (typically phones are designed for use in a fast car) which means the mobile will fail to register to the network and retry registration repeatedly.

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