Trail of Light

So this a series that I am going to try and keep up that show cases some of the conclusions we can come up when we make basic common sense deductions. But first let me start by the first law in any scientific study that should guide anyone observing common sense situations A hypothesis can only be proven WRONG by a test. That means that NO hypothesis can be proven correct by a test. Okay enough for the academics.

The first series is going to deal with cell phones and airplanes. Anyone who has flown a plane has heard the customary warning to keep cellphones off cause they may effect the behavior of the plane. Now I am no aviation engineer (although I am a telecommunications one) so I can not conclusively state one way or the other, but I am willing to accept the situation as a rule (as in you want to change the rules get your own plane ). My problem starts with the dozens of people who propagate the hypothesis: Any cellphone operating will cause a plane to malfunction. I am sure you have heard those especially from people you have shared flights with. So let us analyze.

I do not have any hard numbers about the number of daily commercial flights around the world but given that in the US alone is 30,000 (according to NATCA) I think it is fair to assume that daily around the world we would have 10 times that number. So let us say that there are 300,000 daily commercial flights around the world. Now assuming an average flight size of 50 passengers (my guess I am being very lax but okay) that makes a total of 1.5 million flight passengers every day. Now we are going to assume 65% of those have cellphones (4.6 billion out of the world population of 7 billion have cell phones according to Wikipedia). That means so far we have 975,000 people with cell phones that are flying each day. Some of these people do not listen to the rules, others are just forgetful and some just pack their cellphones in the baggage that they checked in and simply did not turn it off. For the case of our study I am going to be very lax with my assumption and say that only 0.1% of all those people have forgotten to turn off their cellphones for one reason or the other. That gives us 975 cellphones that are operating everyday on commercial flights. I will go one step further and say that of those only 1% happen to receive calls while within cellphone reception. The conclusion to all those assumptions would be that each day we would have to hear about at least 9 planes being in some trouble due to cell phones only. And the reality I have yet to hear one conclusive plane incident due to a cell phone .

So in conclusion let me say the following points:

1. In regards to cells and airplanes, the rules are to keep your phones off so keep your phones off. If you have a problem with that rule take it up with the airline or the government or start your own airline. But in no case should you start stories that defies logic in order to try and convince yourself that you are doing it because you want to.
2. The analysis above only tells us that the stories that we hear from our friendly passengers are just logic defying however it is not conclusive on what is the effect of cellphones on planes (they can possibly degrade radio quality). The only thing we can infer is that planes do not come crashing done on a daily basis because you forgot to turn off your cellphone.
3. When someone tells you a story and it just does not add to your sense of logic, question it and you too might find a case of the common sense .

Until next time keep questioning.