toledoblade.com --

IT HAPPENS at least once on just about every commercial airline flight in America: Someone quietly flips open his cell phone and makes a call at 20,000 feet. It's against regulations, but more and more fliers are finding their urge to chat outweighs vague federal rules.

In May, the FCC will auction radio spectrums meant to enable web-surfers and telephone talkers more freedom in the sky. European and Japanese regulators are eyeing similar rule changes.

Not so fast, warns a Carnegie Mellon University School of Engineering and Public Policy study released in "IEEE Spectrum" magazine. Radio waves emitted by the phones are more dangerous than first believed, it says.

"Our data and [previous] NASA studies suggest a clear and present danger: Cell phones can render GPS instruments useless for landings," the authors warn. "Interference from games and wi-fi-equipped laptops can interfere with key cockpit avionics."

Aviation safety is a deadly serious business these days. People who light up cigarettes - or shoes - are wrestled to the floor and arrested.

Knitting needles, pocket knives, and cuticle scissors, until recently, were considered potential weapons, ways for evil operators to destroy million-dollar airplanes and hundreds of human lives.

The rules are often burdensome, but most everyone aboard is glad to cooperate with authorities.

Even so, the cell phone threat evidently is not taken seriously, perhaps because no one has yet brought down a jet with something purchased at Best Buy.

The CMU study sent three electro-magnetics experts with sensor-laden backpacks aboard 37 commercial flights throughout the Northeast. Passengers' cell phones, laptops, personal stereos, and electronic games left distinctive signatures on electromagnetic readouts.

Cell phones create the strongest interference, the researchers pointed out, and if multiple telephones are allowed in flight the combined electronic racket "will, in all likelihood, someday cause an accident."

Another sobering finding: The researchers said between one and four cell phone calls were made from every flight, some during critical flight stages such as climb-out or final approach.

It's true that a good pilot may not need a global positioning system to navigate or land a plane, but allowing communications junkies free rein without fully considering such research could be downright tragic.

"We feel that passenger use of portable electronic devices on aircraft should continue to be limited for the safety of all concerned," the study says.

For the safety of all, and the comfort, too. Who wants to spend 3,000 miles strapped into a seat beside a cell-phone yapper?

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