Cellphones a flight danger? Could be on some Boeing jets | IOL Business Report

INTERNATIONAL - U.S. government officials in 2014 revealed an alarming safety issue: Passenger cellphones and other types of radio signals could pose a crash threat to some models of Boeing 737 and 777 airplanes.

Honeywell hasn’t heard of any blanking display screens caused by cell phones or other radio frequencies while an airplane was in flight, spokeswoman Nina Krauss said. When airlines and Honeywell argued that radio signals were unlikely to cause safety problems during flight, though, the FAA countered that it had run tests on in-service planes -- and the jets flunked.

The FAA order didn’t quantify the amount of radio signals needed to cause interference problems. An agency spokesman said Thursday that the FAA bases the compliance time for its airworthiness directives on the risk that a condition poses. “A 60-month compliance time frame means the risk is low, and does not need to be addressed right away,” he said.

Honeywell initially told the FAA that 10,100 display units -- or the equivalent of almost 1,700 planes -- were affected worldwide. When asked this week about the progress of the fixes, Honeywell’s Krauss said that 8,000 components had been replaced and fewer than 400 needed upgrading. Both Delta Air Lines Inc. and Southwest Airlines Co. have completed their overhauls, according to the companies. American Airlines Group Inc. has 14 more jets that need refurbished units, and United Airlines still needs to replace components across 17 aircraft, representatives from those companies said.

In January 2017, pilots of a 737 flying out of Costa Rica lost all of their map displays and the flight-management computers on both sides of the plane “during a critical phase of flight in mountainous terrain,” according to the crew’s ASRS report. If the flight information had disappeared in bad weather or at night, “it could have been a potentially disastrous outcome,” the pilot wrote.

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