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.
