A bit of this and a bit of that

Have you ever wondered why you can’t use a mobile phone when you’re on a plane? Well, I came across an article today that talks about it, so here’s a snippet for your information:

An airplane contains a number of radios for a variety of tasks. There is a radio that the pilots use to talk to ground control and air traffic control (ATC). There is another radio that the plane uses to disclose its position to ATC computers. There are radar units used for guidance and weather detection, and so on. All of these radios are transmitting and receiving information at specific frequencies. If someone were to turn on a cell phone, the cell phone would transmit with a great deal of power (up to 3 watts). If it happens to create interference that overlaps with radio frequencies the plane is using, then messages between people or computers may be garbled. If one of the wires in the plane has damaged shielding, there is some possibility of the wire picking up the cell phone signals just like my computer’s speakers do. That could create faulty messages between pieces of equipment within the plane.

That explains it huh?