The US government in 2014 informed about a shocking safety issue – passenger mobile phones and other various types of radio signals are crash threatening to some models of Boeing 737 and 777 aeroplanes.
As per Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), more than 1300 jets posted in the US had cockpit screens vulnerable to interference from Wi-Fi, mobile phones and even outside frequencies such as weather radar. The FAA has given airlines until November 2019 to replace the units made by Honeywell International Inc.
As per an FAA report, hundreds of planes worldwide are still flying with such unsafe systems. Due to interfering signals, loss of flight-critical data including airspeed, altitude and navigation is a possibility and the planes taking flight, “result in loss of aeroplane control at an altitude insufficient for recovery.”
However, Honeywell hasn’t reported any such cases or events where they had experienced blanking of displays caused by cell phones or other radio frequencies while flying in the air. Although, while in an argument with various airlines and Honeywell, the FAA countered that it had run tests on in-service planes and had detected the jets displays dropping and on them. The FAA has not quantified the number of radio signals needed to cause interference problems.
The Boeing 737’s are supposed to be a next-generation model, a predecessor of the Boeing Max, which was involved in two crashes in less than five months.
