New research that uncovers "disturbing" safety issues may ground the possibility of in-flight cell phone calls — sanctioned ones, anyway. Even if those matters are resolved, in-flight mobile calls seem a long shot to get off the ground, thanks to a tangle of bureaucratic and political issues.
It's fitting that a trio of electrical engineers has put forth the clearest argument against in-flight mobile usage to date. After all, it requires a Ph.D. to make sense of the decision-making process.
This much is clear, according to a March 2006 article in the monthly publication of the Institute of Electrical & Electronic Engineers (IEEE) by Bill Strauss, M. Granger Morgan, Jay Apt, and Daniel Stancil, "Unsafe at Any Airspeed?" (www.spectrum.ieee.org/mar06/3069): "Our data and the NASA studies suggest to us that there is a clear and present danger: Cell phones can render GPS instruments useless for landings." Their research contains other troubling findings as well: At least one scofflaw per flight, on average, uses a cell phone in violation of regulations.
