[CamperBob2]

This is just a variation on the old "Turn off your Game Boys before takeoff, or the plane might crash" schtick.

The proper way to fix that issue, if there ever was one, was to mandate the implementation of avionics that can't be jammed by a Part 15 device. Instead, look what happened... we got a decade of silly, groundless rules that had no useful effect and were eventually scrapped.

Now it looks like it's the WiFi industry's turn. Gee, maybe putting weather radar right next to an unlicensed ISM band wasn't such a great idea. Maybe they're the ones who should move.

[AnimalMuppet]

> Gee, maybe putting weather radar right next to an unlicensed ISM band wasn't such a great idea. Maybe they're the ones who should move.

Doesn't work that way. They're trying to detect air movement. That's hard; it's not possible at just random frequencies. You can't (effectively) move the radars without changing physics. They're at the frequency they're at for a reason, not just because of random bureaucratic decisions.

(Of course, it's not that simple. Of course you can move them - at some loss of effectiveness. How much, to move them how far? I can't answer that.)

[CamperBob2]

I haven't looked into it in depth, but AFAIK weather radar works at X band, doesn't it? And it doesn't detect air movement, but water droplets, correct?

[cpncrunch]

It's not quite the same as the gameboy. There have never been any instances of electronics interfering with avionics, but there have been quite a few instances of wifi interfering with weather radar. Also the weather radar was there first, and the issues were known right from the start.

[Karunamon]

If by "quite a few", you mean "20" - which is insignificant compared to the ~80K flights happening in this country every year.

[cpncrunch]

20 that have been noticed and charged. One is too many. How would you like to end up flying through a thunderstorm or a microburst? Most of the cases happened in Puerto Rico, where they get thunderstorms almost every day at certain times of year. It just takes one plane to fly through a thunderstorm to give everyone a very bad day.

[quotemstr]

Kill all humans. That's a surefire way to prevent any more violations. After all, "one is too many". Your comments indicate that you're not even trying to balance different public interest concerns.

[cpncrunch]

I'm a pilot, so I understand the issue first-hand. The simple way to balance all interests is to separate the radio software from the router software. Are you more interested in getting a cheap flashable router than in air safety? This has nothing to do with freedom, but more to do with people/companies being too cheap to separate the radio from the router software.

[Karunamon]

Not the best way to balance all interests - then you get into a wonderful situation like we have in the mobile market where there's a closed source, proprietary, unauditable (and therefore potentially hostile) blob running in the radio that can do evil things no matter what the rest of the software is doing.

Personally I like the way that we handle people who point lasers at aircraft: find them, throw the book at them pour encourager les autres, and meanwhile don't try to ban f*cking laser pointers.

[aianus]

> Are you more interested in getting a cheap flashable router than in air safety?

Yes, it's more important that 299m Americans who don't live beside an airport be able to use that spectrum than some small number of passengers per year that may or may not die in a possible crash that might be caused by wifi interference.

There are so many lower-hanging fruit for safety that this is a non-issue.

[the_ancient]

>>Are you more interested in getting a cheap flashable router than in air safety?

Yes, I do not fly, have no interest in flying and could care less if the entire aviation industry went bankrupt. I stopped flying the day the TSA took over the airports.

Freedom is more important to me than Flying.

[hueving]

False dichotomy. The pilots like yourself are more of a risk to everyone on the plane than the probability of one of these causing a crash. Was it a WiFi router than made a Malaysian airline fly over an active war zone? Was it a WiFi router that causes the air France pilots to forget how to fly and stall the Airbus into the ocean?