I don't need my iPad THAT much

This week the Federal Aviation Administration is considering relaxing rules for personal electronics aboard airplanes, principally to allow use of tablets and media players throughout flights. While I've found those rules to be inconvenient at times like the discovery that I can't continue reading my electronic book during takeoff like I could with good old paper ones. Still, I would favor keeping the restrictions in place, even only against the off chance that some machine some time could affect the airplane.

The reasoning is that I have experienced personal electronics affecting a navigational instrument. Fortunately it was on a boat and not in the air where it could have been more serious.

During most of the 1980s I ran a 45-passenger tour boat.  It will take a little geography lesson about the boat to explain what happened.  The wheelhouse of the boat was raised above the main deck by a couple of steps. Forward of the wheelhouse a passageway led four steps down past a ledge on the forward bulkhead.  At the bottom of the steps if someone turned left there was a head for public use.  To the right was the captain's cabin.  Positioned on the ledge everyone had to pass was the electronic compass that actually directed the vessel's autopilot.

Early in the season one year, the local school district chartered the vessel for a week to take a group of students on a tour of Prince William Sound.  They slept in schools at night and we traveled during the day, seeing as much of the sound as we could.  These were the days of Walkman CD players and every kid on the boat had one.

On about the second day with the water glassy calm and in a wide passage, we were tootling along with the autopilot on, the boat all of a sudden took a sharp turn to the right. I quickly grabbed the wheel and shut off the autopilot and corrected the course, but not without a little concern about what had caused that.

For the next few minutes, I experimented, turning the pilot on for short periods and watched carefully to see if it would happen again.  After a while it seemed to work properly so I relaxed and let the boat run along steering itself. Using an autopilot doesn't mean you can walk away from the helm, just that you don't have to manipulate the wheel. So, still not completely trusting the autopilot, I watched carefully.

Sure enough about an hour later, it happened again; the boat took a sharp turn to the right. The action baffled us and we couldn't think of a logical reason why the autopilot would out of nowhere send the boat off in another direction.

I began testing it again and also looking for what was different on the boat.  It happened again, this time just as one of the kids with a Walkman went down the steps to the forward head.  The boat turned hard right. And that was when we figured it out.

I stopped for a minute and we tested a little and sure enough when that kid went to the head with his player turned on, that compass on the ledge he passed followed him right into the head and took the boat on a hard right turn with it.

When we stopped for the evening we played with that compass a little and it turned out only one kind of walkman-type player had that effect.  Of all the ones the kids had on the boat, only a Panasonic affected the compass and only if it was playing as it passed the compass.  Once we had figured it out, we had a good chuckle over it, with jokes like wondering what kind of music the compass preferred. But the mystery was solved and rules established.

Of course that was early in the electronics age and the compass had been placed in an exposed position, but it still lingers in my mind that some electronic devices certainly can affect certain navigational instruments, and as a general rule if something can happen, sooner or later it usually will.  Given that, I would prefer to put my tablet reader aside until someone is absolutely sure it cannot alter the airplane electronics, and that assumes the determination can be made with any certainty.