It's worth remembering this didn't occur in a vacuum. From Senator McCaskill's open letter to the head of the FAA last December¹:

…I urge the agency to embrace the expanded use of PEDs…

…the public is growing increasingly skeptical of prohibitions on the use of many electronic devices…

…such anachronistic policies undermine the public's confidence in the FAA…

…absurdity of the current situation…

…It is my hope that the FAA will work, with the FCC and other federal agencies where appropriate, as expeditiously as possible to implement common sense changes…

…I am prepared to pursue legislative solutions should progress be made too slowly.

␄

¹ http://www.mccaskill.senate.gov/?p=press_release&id=1757

Contemporaneous HN posting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4914344

Only took them, what, a decade? Maybe longer?

Things like this breed distrust in the government. If they had reacted in a couple of years after wifi became prevalent you could easily argue the "we need more testing" angle and people would buy it. But after 10+ years there's no good excuse.

What other stuff is happening right now that the government says is "unsafe" (and thus banned) which is actually safe, and what is "safe" (and thus not banned) which is not?

The only way for a government to have a believable claim to legitimacy is to work ruthlessly to minimize false positives and false negatives and if/when they happen to root out the source of the problem and ensure it'll never happen again. Sadly we rarely see much or any of this.

Let me first state up front: I think this policy was dumb and should have been done away with long ago.

However, I think that "breed distrust in the government" quip is completely asinine. The FAA's airline policies overall have resulted in an industry where you can buy a ticket across the country for just a few hundred dollars, while simultaneously being so safe that it has become literally impossible to measure the danger of flying on an airliner in the US, because incidents don't happen frequently enough for there to be enough data.

The electronic devices policy is/was a tiny little wart on an unbelievably successful regulatory environment. To act like this somehow destroys trust in government is insane. You're basically expecting perfection and rejecting a massive success as being terrible just because there's an extremely minor problem buried within.

It wasn't a quip that I made up to score points. I think it does undermine legitimacy of those making rules when it takes them 10 years to admit that they were wrong.

The problem is that it's something very public and that everyone already knows it doesn't cause problems. There are all kinds of electronic devices which don't have an "off" button. Do they somehow magically not create EM interference? Tons of people have been ignoring the rules for years and it's taken years and years for the FAA to say "well you know maybe it's OK"

The problem there is that there are all kinds of nutjobs out there who use this kind of thing to promote their own crazy theories. And because the timeline to go from most people understanding empirically that electronics don't crash planes to the FAA admitting it was so long, it lends credence to the idea that any rule could be bullshit. If it takes 10 years to find out that something was overly cautious, who's to say it might not take 20 or 30 for something else? Those arguments can be very persuasive to people already inclined to be skeptical.

I honestly don't see why we should care what nutjobs think.

For the average person, stuff like this does very little to undermine anything.

It's not that we care what nutjobs think; it's that this kind of thing is ammo for nutjobs to use to convince otherwise rational people that a crazy nutjob theory just MIGHT be right.

It doesn't matter that the FAA is an effective organization and most of the regulations it comes up with are perfectly justified. The general public doesn't know what the training requirements are for pilots, or how to file a flight plan, or how the ATC system is run. They see this one policy regarding personal electronics, which is obviously flawed, and make judgments about the agency on that basis. So, rightly or wrongly, it does undermine public confidence in the FAA at least a little bit.

Meh. I can't get too upset about overconservative flight safety regulations. Yes, the risk was utterly minuscule from the get-go, but the cost of an accident in-flight is being weighed against the cost of your fellow citizens not being allowed to log into Facebook.

Taken to the logical extreme, it would seem that no electronics should be allowed on the plane.

There is a reasonable line here. In a year 90% of us will think the current one was idiotic. Seriously - I can't read a kindle on takeoff/landing?

Don't get me wrong - I'm all for eliminating risk - but it would have taken very little effort to add WiFi/Eletronic transmitter detectors to planes - the fact that they didn't, means that it was never a real risk.

>>Meh. I can't get too upset about overconservative flight safety regulations.

No. No no no no.

Logic like this is often used by the government to justify the existence of things like the TSA. "We need to be overconservative to prevent terrorist attacks." Except it doesn't work when the measures are of questionable benefit whereas the costs are astronomical.

A major difference is that the TSA is largely protecting against a fictional threat, while the FAA's safety regulations are, overall, acting on proven dangers and are demonstrably successful.

Airline travel used to be pretty dangerous. Today, in the US, it's about as safe as any human endeavor has ever been. The danger is close enough to zero that the delta cannot be properly measured. Even in the past decade or so, airline travel has become much safer.

This particular policy was almost certainly not useful. But the overall regime of "better safe than sorry" has proven to be highly effective in this particular context.

>>This particular policy was almost certainly not useful. But the overall regime of "better safe than sorry" has proven to be highly effective in this particular context.

The context here is this particular policy, not FAA's approach to airline travel as a whole.

You have to consider the agency and their mandates. What is it that is the FAA's number one priority: to make air travel safe. This means all of their policies are made from that perspective. They are a technical/regulatory agency, they don't really interact with the public. They interact with the airplane industry. As such, it's not really helpful to paint them with the same brush as the TSA or NSA. The FAA maybe slow to adjust their rules, but that doesn't mean it's with malice.

The TSA, on the other hand, is all about interacting with the public to try and make us feel safer about travel in general. Generally, interacting with the public is rarely a strong point for any government agency.

This particular policy exists (or existed) as it is (was) precisely because of the context of FAA's approach to airline travel as a whole.

Sure, it's a bad policy. But it's a bad policy that came out of an overall approach that has proven to be superb. To think that this one failure is an indication of anything is absurd. You can't expect perfection.

Indeed. But that's not the case here.

Another perspective is that your default position should be to distrust everything that the government communicates, and only accept as believable those things that you have identified yourself as being true.

With regard to safety rules - there are usually two issues at hand, neither of which have anything to do with safety (particularly your safety).

On the one hand, you have people who believe it is always better to err on the side of safety - whether that means you taking your shoes off every time you board a plane, patting down/scanning every single passenger, or saying you can't read a kindle during takeoff - there is ZERO cost to the person requiring that rule, and even an infinitesimal risk (say, 1 in a billion) means that there is real cost to the individual/group saying we can forego those precautions.

Because the inconvenience/costs of the "Safety Rules" are born by others, but the potential (no matter how small) cost of not having that rule is borne by the individual who said it was no longer needed - the default position will ALWAYS be to add more safety rules.

Pushing the other direction is $$$. Anytime people with $$$ are involved, all sorts of safety rules are dropped. There wasn't a big kindle/laptop lobby pushing for the dropping of the NoElectronics rule, which is why it lasted so long.

Seems like there some good justifications for why they were so cautious. There were suspected cases where a PED interfered with the plane.

http://www.boeing.com/commercial/aeromagazine/aero_10/interf...

The restrictions predate wifi; they are based on supposed risk from EMF interference. You can't listen to your iPod during takeoff either ("please shut off all portable electronic devices").

Good news for humanity, bad news for the print industry. For the last few years, the only time my wife and I bought magazines was at the airport before a flight so we had something to read for the departure and arrival when we had to "shut off all the devices with an on/off switch"

I used to buy print at airports also when I used to fly several years ago… of course, at that time, laptop batteries didn't last even a 2.5hr flight unless you got lucky and found an available plug in the boarding area. Plus laptops were bigger and noisier.

Nowadays you have Air/ultrabooks, iPads with 10hr batteries, and Kindles so one never need actually resort to dead-tree.

I don't know what percentage of overall print volume is covered by airport purchases, but I bet this spells bad news for the newsagents and bookshops at an airport. I wouldn't like to own one of them right now.

In the UK the airport 'news'agents now have entire walls of refrigerated bottled water.

There is no law in the UK requiring airports to provide free potable water to the public, so at around $3 per bottle this is an extremely lucrative consequence of security regulations.

Compared to that revenue, selling magazine is old hat!

* I am always delighted at the provision of water fountains in US airports. O'Hare even has ones specifically designed for filling bottles!

I still believe the issue is more deeply rooted in passenger safety than in actual electrical interference. Take-off and landing are generally regarded as the most risk-prone activities for an aircraft. Having passengers at least slightly less disengaged likely benefits everyone. Not to mention it is arguably unpleasant to have 200 tablets flying about.

"Sir, please shut off your electronics device as it may interfere with the navigational systems."

"Um, no. Did you SEE that episode of myth busters?"

"Oh. Well.. um.. the real reason is so you pay attention".

You can't just change the reason because your original reason has been proven wrong. If this was the real reason, then they should have been upfront about it.

But like a sibling commenter states - reading a book (as opposed to a kindle), or being deaf (as opposed to wearing earphones - this one's probably a bad comparison..) carry the same 'risks' and neither are banned.

My counterpoint to that would be that I can still sit and read a hard cover copy of Godel, Escher, Bach. It'd keep me just as disengaged and is certainly more dangerous than an iPad when airborne.

Why are there so many bars in airports, then?

If you think these rules are absurd, you should see the FAA regulations on equipment you can install into private planes. NASA allows new tech into space WAY faster.

So you can talk over wifi.

Let's see how that goes over when 50+ people in a small space start yammering.

You could try, but the latency with the satellite or terrestrial towers is going to be significant. Unless you mean talking from one seat to another... in which case, yes, that would be annoying. :)