Gossip

Avionics "expert" ends up sitting on Blair's wet patch... talking about inflight cellphones

It's apparently true: The Boss is now an expert on avionics. Well, aviation electronics. It says so, in the Times.

It went rather like this. The Times travel section rang one of Orange's executives, and wanted to know about current moves to have cellphones approved for in-flight use. We have to presume, they have been reading the Congressional hearings...

The Orange executive decided it was time to consult an expert, and since they were all busy, rang The Boss. So The Boss briefed him as well as he could, since we've written quite alot about this subject recently. And the Boss has even written about it elsewhere...

At the end of that, the Times reporter rang NewsWireless, and we pointed her at various stories on this web site and explained the subject of in-plane interference as well as could be managed. The result was the story that ran today.

The entertaining part of the story is that the Editor of NewsWireless was apparently  supposed to end up on the GMTV sofa tomorrow morning, explaining why the Federal Aviation Authority still objects to inflight cellphones, even though the FCC - the Federal Communications Commission - is happy with them. I think the explanation is: "They are bureaucrats. It's not their job to deprive themselves of work."

Good news for our Editor, though: the producers at GMTV say "actually, there's no disagreement about this... so you can sleep in..."

So no story for the TV cameras, and the FAA are going to carry on with their own investigation. And quite right, too; who'd want them to say: "No, no, if the FCC is happy, then we're happy with the FCC..." ?

Well, apart from me... but what do I know? I'm just a humble network sniffer...

[sniff