Laptops blamed for Qantas flight incident

Airline operators must have RF sensors on board then. Sound alarm when wifi is turned on.

Simple.

If mobiles bring down planes then why are some airlines charging an arm and a leg to use their own mobile phones?

If phone are not safe to use on board please tell us why, otherwise with airlines selling us airtime with their own expensive phones the message the public hears is "It's ok to use a phone on a plane now".

Some of you tools really should read the article before flaming Qantas...

"Air safety investigators say it is too early to blame passenger laptop computers for causing a Qantas jet to abruptly nose dive on a flight from Singapore to Perth."

They are not blaming a notebook. Do you understand the terms 'not', 'too early' and 'deny'?

And as for your excuses of 'fly by wire' and 'all aircraft should be shielded', if the aircraft was shielded 100%, then there would be absolutely no electronics able to fly the plane. No fly by wire, no gps, no avionics...

And WTF is with the title?

"Laptops blamed for Qantas flight incident" There was one notebook, and it is NOT being blamed.

FFS.

...100% pure bullshat.

NO FREAKING WAY did any laptop interfere with that aeroplane. We know about aeroplane makers paranoia, and they are shielded against even purposeful ATTACKS by wireless technology. They're now suggesting that a weapons-grade system designed to be not interferable is forked up by a laptop? Yeah, right.

And there's no connection to Qantas moving their maintenance offshore, and all the other recent mishaps that 'just happened'..... give me a break

We Aussies don't love them enough to spell their name correctly obviously.

Clarification: Qantas have never _written off_ a jet airframe.

I presume this laptop explanation will be followed by blaming cell phones, and if pressed for something more realistic, gremlins.

If airplanes were susceptible to interference from these sources, we'd see a lot of smoking holes in the ground, and continuous news stories about aircraft upsets. I can't wait to hear what the real root cause is, but so far these explanations sound like bs to me.

Try reading again.

"Laptops could have interfered with the plane's on-board computer system, it has been reported.

But the bureau says it's too early to make that judgment."

They are simply not ruling anything out, and are going to include the possibility into their investigation, as a matter of course.

Furthermore:

"AIR safety investigators say they have so far found no evidence that electronic interference from a passenger's mobile phone or laptop computer caused a Qantas Airbus to make an uncontrolled descent.

"But they say such interference remains one possible cause of the incident that injured more than 70 passengers and crew during a flight from Singapore to Perth on Tuesday.

"Australian Transport Safety Bureau investigations director Julian Walsh said questions about the possibility the incident was caused by such a device would be included in a survey of passengers.

"He said the investigation would examine a wide range of factors that could influence the aircraft's operation.

Because of donc504 and Fred Fry's comments, I must retract what I said above. I spoke too hastily and, had I thought about it for a minute or two, I would have realized about the "old" design of the aircraft vs. the "new" technology. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the planes were designed to operate at or near the frequencies used by today's computer technologies.

So, maybe it IS quite possible that the laptop was the cause of the mishap.

Good comments guys.

This excuse to shroud their incompetence/poor engineering/maintenence issues is pathetic and transparent to any layperson with an appreciation of avionics.

...And they know it.

Here's a fact: Modern day aircraft with fly-by-wire systems are shielded from electronic interference. (Its typically a metal mesh that wraps around cables, etc).

So the excuse of a laptop or mobile phones causing problems is BS.

The more likely cause (given the recent incidents that Qantas is having), is maintenance. They tried to cut costs by outsourcing it.

Guess what happens? You save a buck, but it'll cost you reliability and your reputation.

...you're not allow to carry that pringles can on board with you.

1. I know a guy who designs PCBs for avionics.
He won't fly ANY plane ( because he can't believe the incompetence of the engineering in 'em )

2. Shielding isn't something that 
people put into systems that NEED to work right, until they are legislated into doing it.

3. TSA will have no choice, whatsoever, but to force everyone to check their notebooks. Of course no insurance company in the world is going to insure our notebooks, *and* the TSA staff DO have access to all luggage that passes through their sticky paws... ( with keys, yet )

With the no-lithium-battery in checked luggage rule, however, you're going to have to get rid of any notebook that you can't remove the battery from.

Beautiful.

Perfectly configured DoS against all citizens of our world ( who fly ).

Terrorism, that uses the conjunction between engineering/management incompetence & government authority, to rob everyone of much more freedom, *efficiently*.

Without our half ( the incompetence & authoritarian half ) of the bargain, it'd be ineffective, wouldn't it?

Who here wants to bet that the "solution" WON'T be to force the planes to be made right?

A few thoughts based on my 25 years as an avionics engineer:

1) Speculation in aviation incidents like this is not helpful. Yes, laptops "could" have caused the problem but then again little green men from mars "could have caused it". The list of things that "could" have caused it is near endless.

2) Virtually all commercial aircraft flying today including the A300-300 are based on original design and type certificates that are dated well before anyone ever considered that passengers would have and want to use transmitters or digital electronics that could inadvertantly generate gigahertz frequencies in aircraft cabins. Therefore, they were never designed to handle this type of interference.

3) The A330-300 design effort was started in the late 1980s and was a modernized version of the A300 which was designed in the early 1970's. I doubt anyone on the design team was real worried about gigahertz clocked laptops and digital cellphones being used in flight.

4) Full size commercial aircraft such as the A330 cost billions of dollars to design and certify and hundreds of millions of dollars to purchase. Manufacturers are currently having trouble building enough to meet demand. Designing new ones or redesigning old ones and then building enough of them to replace the current fleet in order to make them more RF safe would not be practical in anything less than decades. Particularly since at this point no major incident during the cruise portion of flight has been tied to this problem.

5) Most aircraft are relatively immune to this type of interfence due to design features intended to knockout other frequencies and RF sources that were anticipated by the designers but overtime corrosion, poor build quality, or poor maintenance can degrade the protection from these signal sources. A specific example is shielding of wires which is commonplace but if the shield's path to ground is interupted by corrosion or an inadvertant open circuit, the protection is lost.

6) It has been proven that in specific instances, passenger equipment in the cabin can effect an aircraft's systems but this depends on the proper alignment of the equipment type, the aircraft type, the position of the transmitting equipment inside the aircrat, the maintenance state of the transmitting equipment and the aircraft wiring and systems, etc. It is not a problem that is likely to happen but figure in the large number of flights that occur around the world on a daily basis and it is bound to occur.

7) The biggest threat is not from a properly functioning piece of passenger electronics but one which is broken and radiating a considerably stronger signal than allowed by governmental agencies such as the FCC. This is a common occurence. In a few cases, people intentially boost the power of transmitting devices beyond what is allowed. The antenna design can also procude a substantial gain in a specific direction making the transmitter appear to be much more powerful than it really is.

8) One writer mentioned that other aircraft systems contain computers and transmitters. This is true but modern aicraft have always gone through extensive Electromatic Compatibility Testing to ensure that an aircraft's equipment does not interfere with its self. It turns out that initial testing typically does point out problems in this area and designers must go back and fix the problems. There are many good design practices that should be used when developing an aircraft's avionics suite but EMC design is still a bit of a black art.

9) The Airbus A350 and Boeing 787 are the first original designs from either of these companies since it has been clear that passengers will use and operate modern high frequency generating laptops and digital handheld devices on aircraft. Lets hope that they take all the proper precautions and the end products protection from the devices will be robust.

10) In 30 or 40 years, pretty much the entire fleet should consist of aircraft that wre designed to resist interference from today's RF threats.

Murray's right. If this was true, they wouldn't divulge it. Given that they've blamed 802.11 and bluetooth, it simply cannot be true.

There's something else going on.

They used to blame Libyans for old planes falling apart in midair. Now they blame technology.

Planes continue to fly after being struck by lightning but we're supposed to believe that the signal from a wireless mouse will bring it down. Ya, right.

I have to doubt that laptops have caused this but some of the comments are just not thought through. 

1. The designer needs their head examined.
The A330 was designed in the late '80s and early '90s, first flying in 1993. WiFi was first introduced in the late 90's. At the time of the aircraft being designed most mobile phones were the size of bricks, how exactly were Airbus (or Boeing) supposed to know this was going to be a 'commonly used frequency'? Everyone is told to turn off their mobile phones and wifi on their computers, it probably is okay but would you be happy to gamble with the lives of hundreds of people to find out? 

2. The aircraft and engine computers are shielded but there are some systems that cannot be, namely radar, radios, navigation antennas. These have to be able to pick up radio waves and therefore are vulnerable to interference. Unless you want airliners flown by pilots by the seat of their pants. Aircraft autopilots link into the navigation system so an error in one will cause an error in the other. To see an extreme example Google the Korean Air 747 shot down over the USSR in the '80s.

3. The safety authorities are short of money, covering it up, don't have a clue.
Firstly the ATSB said 'may' i.e. it is a theory not the definitive cause. Secondly, the safety authorities generally have powers up there with God when it comes to accident investigation. They are allowed to look under every rock and in every nook and cranny to find the cause of a crash. In the UK the AAIB requires safety inspectors to have current commercial (ATPL) licences. Do you honestly think people who might be flying the same aircraft are going to be happy let it go with a major problem?

Discovered New Device

Device: Airbus A320

Initializing...

As seen on a passenger's laptop seconds earlier.

...that these multi-billion dollar aircraft companies build planes that are vulnerable to everyday, commonly used frequencies. You'd think that they would shield them from any type of interference.

I'm wondering if this laptop "excuse" is just to save face. I wonder if it was just an "internal" malfunction.

Save money on pilots...
Install MS flightsim on a laptop & let a 12 year old fly the plane from economy class ;)

I love it. So they have a basic design flaw built into the plane by "possibly" having computers or other equipment that can be affected by computer equipment/cellphone signals and other wireless devices and they are blaming it on those devices? As stated in the previous sentence......this is a design problem with the plane and has nothing to do with any other equipment. If someones laptop can cause this, imagine what else can happen. Placing the blame elsewhere doesn't solve the problem, but then again....common sense isn't quite so common and neither is critical thinking.

The people who designed the planes systems in such a way that wireless devices can interfere with the planes controls needs to have their head examined. I wonder if they ride in those planes themselves and start sweating when they see someone turn on a laptop. They are definately not the sharpest tool in the shed.

If a mere laptop wifi signal or wireless mouse signal could cause this kind of thing to happen to a bloody airbus or Boeing then this is a serious security flaw with the aero plane. I can't believe they would blame this on laptops what a crock, next minute terrorists will be out buying wifi dongles and wireless mice by the dozen.... I seriously doubt that a wireless signal would have any influence on the plane whatsoever. The only wireless gear would be to ground control and gps, radar no critical systems will be wireless, I highly doubt the signals to the plane will be anything less than a digital signal possibly encrypted with plenty of CRC checks. 

If laptops were to blame then I think they would be keeping it hush hush until they fix the flaws in their crude systems before divulging that information to the public. 

Maybe they should try shutting down the navigation computers too... 

They are eletronic devices you know, not to mention the engines and stuff.

Funny how both of these events happened with Quantas owned Airbus planes, not those owned by other carriers (especially US and East Asisn ones). Since all Airbus planes have 3 onboard computers, something major must have happened to crash the plane is such a spectacular way.

I do not beleive for the slightest that useage of laptops caused on the aircraft caused the crash, unless Airbus used an unsecured 802.11 wireless network to link the control computers together and a group of idiots decided to hack into it for giggles.

"It seems those pesky warnings about using electronics on board planes could indeed have something to them after all."
Or it seems it's a nice scapegoat if you can't be bothered to find the real cause, or don't want to because of cost.

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=unkIVvjZc9Y

Harden the fcuk up !!

Quantas should have charged the passengers extra for the "space simulation joy ride".

C'mon people ... lets go again !!

We Aussies love our Quantas.

Note no Quantas jet has ever crashed either.

No big deal.