What is your favorite airline to fly domestically?
Alaska / Horizon?
If you include Southwest, you probably should include the other LCCs like AirTran, jetBlue, Frontier, and even USA3000. 
Alaska/Horizon
Not that I am a fan of Most/Least favorite airline olls and threads, but this one’s been done. Check existing threads before posting, you would have found This One
MAYDAY!!! MAYDAY!!! NEWBIE ALERT!!! MAYDAY!!! MAYDAY!!!
GET 'EM DAMI!!!
How do you spell the sound of the tongue sticking out of mouth while blowing out the air from the lungs over said tongue?
I think I’ll make a poll: When going to a new forum…
- I look at all previous postings
- I scan rapidly all previous postings
- I’m very smart and everyone else on this forum is stupid so obviously any question or poll I post has never been asked or polled
- I’m stupid and don’t think about looking at other postings even though it will probably aid me in the efficient use of the site that the forum applies to
- I don’t know nothing about no english so their is not to much I know about it’s operation*
*Obligatory note to the humor impaired: This is humor, believe it or not. I’m not posting it to offend. If you are offended, well, then, what can I say? How about “who cares?”
Don’t forget, ladies and gentlemen (do we have any of the former here?): The white zone is for immediate loading and unloading only. Do not iron clothes while you are wearing them. Lather, rinse, and repeat. Caution: contents may be hot.
I’m not partial to any particular airline. I fly whatever’s cheapest going my way when I want to get there. The exception to that is that I will NOT fly on any airline that does not allow me to use my GPS receiver in flight. This currently means that I will not fly on American, AirTran, JetBlue, Midway Express, Spirit Airlines and several other lesser-known airlines. United was my last carrier of choice. I’ve flown Delta several times in the last few years and I’m redeeming some Skymiles for a free trip with them soon. Still, I’m gonna go with United for the purpose of this poll…
Didn’t realize any airlines prohibited the use of a GPS. I use mine (a Garmin iQue 3600) on Southwest all the time. The only prohibition on it is not in use below 10,000 feet, which I think is a stupid restriction, considering it’s only a receiver and and a transmitter.
Not to pick, but is that supposed to be “MidWEST Express?” I think Midway (The Airline, not the airport) has been dead and buried for some time.
What? The Meathead call??
Pffffffttttttttttttttttttt!
Sorry, gotta’ wipe off the screen now.
James the Elder
Thanks, James. I always forget the ratio of the F’s to the T’s.
All electronic devices produce at least a tiny amount of radio frequency emmission. It is inherent from the type of circuitry. The levels of most devices are so small that they don’t really bother any other devices. Such devices can get FCC Class B approval from the government. If it is a high-end device produced in recent years (like that iQue 3600), it’ll bear the FCC logo embossed or labeled somewhere on the body of the device - usually the back or underside. It may possibly be found inside the battery compartment. http://img.geocaching.com/cache/log/2b151910-6b2a-4954-b859-a9f7e51cd045.jpg
Sometimes, for whatever reason, a circuit can fail. Under the right circumstances, the failure could cause the device to emit a much stronger signal than it was designed to produce and could possibly interfere with other devices. This is what the 10,000 foot restriction is all about. While the airplane is in cruise and one or more instruments gets all funky, the pilots will have enough time to have the cabin crew sweep the cabin and have all electronic devices turned off to elimintate the possiblity of RFI. Below 10,000 feet, the pilots simply have too much to do to order a sweep of the cabin, so they just nip that possibility in the bud and order all devices turned off.
You very well could be right. I got the list from the following Web page:
gpsinformation.net/airgps/airgps.htm
The list is maintained by GPS techies and is updated from reports of visitors to the Web site. It’s very likely that some other dead airlines may appear on the list. But for what it’s worth, the list is pretty accurate and well maintained. The list of approving airlines has grown tremendously over the last couple of years. It used to be only about half of them approved and half of them did not.
That provides for regional variances that allow the cognoscenti to discriminate between a true “Bronx cheer” and a simple raspberry, or even the infamous Fire Island sibilant.
Regards,
James the Elder
I’ved used a deluo gps on just about every flight of mine (deluoelectronics.com/customer/home.php)- it’s a tiny little box (about 2x2x.75) that hooks up via USB. On most planes I can actually fit it under the window shade, which not only lets me get a better signal but also hides it pretty well (put your coat up on the side by the window and it’ll hide the cable as well). I’ve only been asked about it once, on a Northwest flight, and I told them that it doesn’t transmit anything and they went along their way. I’ve actually had a few flight attendants stop and look at my laptop to see where we were at.
As long as we’re diverting the thread to electronic devices, what about the soon-to-be-ubiquitous RFID tag?
It’s a transponder that transmits when interrogated. If something electronic in the cockpit stumbled across the RFID chip’s interrogation frequency, it would get a response, probably on a frequency could mess up some of the controls.
I’ve never seen any concern expressed about those RFID chips that might unknowingly be brought aboard a flight. That sort of makes one wonder.
From my understanding of the RFID tags, there are two things that should make it not cause a problem.
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They are 100% passive devices. There is no power source, nada, on there. It takes a pretty powerful radio wave to give it enough power to put off it’s own wave, and you’re not going to find that sort of generator/transmitter on an airplane, nor from rogue radio waves floating around the lower atmosphere.
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Assuming that such a transmitter exists, and the tags are emitting a signal at the same strength as say a cell phone (which will never happen when you consider an RFID tag is going 2 feet to the device that’s reading the signal, whereas a cell phone is potentially going miles), it’d have to be on a frequency that is close to one that airplanes use. And, it’d have to be in an older plane- Mythbusters did an episode on cell phones in airplanes and the conclusion I got from it is that the newer planes are so well shielded that blasting large amounts of RF inside the cabin didn’t do anything. Since a large part of the radio spectrum is dictated by the FCC I’m very doubtful they’d give RFID tags the same chunk as radio and navigation equipment.
And, there have already been RFID tags on planes- they’ve been using them on dogs and cats for several years now.
As I search it looks like the tags are either using 13.86 MHz or 868 MHz (spy.org.uk/cgi-bin/rfid.pl#electrosmog). The former is nothing to care about, whereas the latter would be like a very weak cell phone signal, or in otherwords, what we currently have. Remember that there are cell towers littered up and down the country and they don’t affect navigation!
I vote for either US Airways, Sun Country, or Northwest!