Greensboro, NC -- You hear it every time you fly..."Please turn off all your Electronic devices".
Why on earth do they tell us that? You can not tell me my cell phone will bring down a plane!
"Each time we fly and people leave devices on, they're conducting an unauthorized scientific experiment to see if this time it makes any difference," says Captain Chesley Sullenberger. "To see if it affects anything electronically on the airplane."
If anyone knows strange things can happen on a plane, it's Captain Sullenberger.
"The documented problems are fairly rare, but there are some."
Since 2004, NASA's Aviation Safety reporting system listed only about a half a dozen incidents where phones blocked air traffic control frequencies and navigational instruments.
A Boeing expert says on the ground, your phone signal reaches a cell tower or two. But in the air, a phone could possibly reach hundreds of towers and if a passenger is positioned near the airplane's attennea there is a potential for interference.
The interference issues don't end there. When you make a call it comes to a cell tower and then it travels down a wire into the ground. Your cell call then goes through the old-school grid full of telephone wires, poles and underground fiber optic cables to the next cell tower.
But a company called Lightsquared wants to by-pass all that and beam your call to a satellite. The FCC believes that will jam GPS for folks on the ground and anything in the air.
"It's a serious problem, " says North Carolina A&T Electrical Engineering professor Dr. Numan Dogan.
He and his four doctoral students study these types of signals and say the danger is real.
PhD student Jonathan Maston made the interference explanation visual. (You can see it in the attached videos)
The information gets broadcast up and we think it goes straight up, but it spreads out light a flashlight beam. And when a plane flies into the signal path, there's a problem. The plane loses it's GPS and the pilot doesn't know where he is.
But not necessarily all the time....
"Maybe there is a cloud here today and there are no issues, so it's not like you can test it once and it's okay. You could figure out if this interference is recurring, but it might be too late"
Dr. Dogan says intended applications often have un-intended complications. Partly because no device is perfect and in this case, because Lightsquared's band width signal is simply too close to the GPS signal.
Once again, Doctoral student Jonathan Maston visually explains:
GPS is sitting here, this is their real estate and they've built this up and they have their usage. Lightsquared bought the property next to them and wants to build their highway right there here."
Lightsquared's idea for faster 4G service may be dead, but these engineers know, they won't be the last company to push the boundaries.
"It makes me want to be better at my job," says Doctoral student James Griggs. "We haven't designed the perfect system yet so there is still room to grow."
According to our NC A&T engineers, there is no end to the generations available, although they say noone really is talking about 5G as of yet.
In fact, the criteria to define 5G hasn't even been set. And for good reason. 4G is not yet implemented. Current 4-g phones are not truly 4G they just have the capability of some day being 4G (the only caveat to this is in two cities where 4G is truly available).
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