Japanese Airlines Ban DS, PSP

Gamespot is reporting that Japanese Airlines such as Japan Airlines and ANA have banned the use of wifi-capable game devices, including the DS and PSP, over 'safety concerns'. From the article: "A law banning on gaming systems with wireless capabilities came into force on Monday, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Japan's transport ministry has concluded that the electromagnetic waves from the wireless networks can interfere with aircraft navigation systems, so it's no Nintendogs for passengers flying with Japanese airlines. The new law also bans wireless computer mice, and headphones that have not been provided by the airlines, although the use of electric razors, calculators, and cassette players is permitted, readers may be relieved to know."

Re:Fleecing?

[CRiMSON]

You mean the headphones they hand out free? Not sure how you can fleece someone with a free product. I've been on 4 different airlines in the past year and the headphones were always free to use.

Why the PSP?

[sqlrob]

You can easily turn off the wireless with a switch.

There isn't a switch in the DS, but it's not on unless you use a game that turns it on.

Re:How enforcable is this ban?

[Babbster]

Here's my problem with this banning: It would be a trivial exercise to teach flight attendants how to tell if the wireless is active on a Nintendo DS, and I assume that the PSP has a similar activity light. 30 minutes (or less) of training for its employees and they could avoid angering their game-playing customers - that sounds like a pretty good deal.

Re:well,

[Cecil]

A lot of peanut allergies are really severe, and just the dust from someone a few seats over eating peanuts can cause a sometimes severe reaction.

Myth. Peanut allergies can be severe, but never that severe. If you were in a peanut processing facility, or the person a few seats over was smashing hundreds of peanuts into peanut butter, maybe. Just eating peanuts is going to produce an infinitesimally small amount of dust. The likelihood of inhaling even a single particle of dust in that scenario approaches zero, and is not far from the likelihood of inhaling a piece of peanut dust that was picked up on the wind from a chinese peanut factory and blown around the world and directly into your mouth. They are both statistically implausible. And even if it were to happen, a single piece of peanut dust is not enough, in any recorded case of peanut allergy, to cause even a noticeable reaction.

Enough peanut allergens can actually be transferred through saliva (kissing) to cause a mild reaction in the severely allergic but even that is very infrequent, and I can't find a single case of death as a result (No, the death of the Quebec girl had nothing to do with her peanut allergy, contrary to the media reports, it was a cigarette-induced asthma attack)

Re:Question for those who fly more then me....

[EtoilePB]

No. I just flew cross country (JFK/LAS) twice in the last four days. The speech says that anything with an internal transmitter must have that transmitter disabled but the devices themselves are allowed. In fact I was playing MarioKart on my DS Lite most of the way back from Vegas (and my boyfriend was playing Phoenix Wright on his).

Re:Irony

[Detritus]

That's debatable. They are suspected of causing the crash of Crossair flight LX 498.

Re:Umm...

[toriver]

That's a myth: Statistically there are usually some switched-on mobile phones on a plane, and those devices are anyway regulated for frequency bands other than the ones used by air traffic systems and the like.

The real reason is that when you are in the air, they will try and contact - at their maximum power because of the distances involved - the multiple cell network stations the plane passes as it flies at a high speed. This screws with the switching system.

So it's in the interest of the user to turn it off to preserve both battery power and their genetic material :) and in the interest of the cell phone companies to preserve network stability.