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Can Radiation Zap Your Data in Flight?
The Travel Technologist · April 12, 1999

When the lights on his plane started "to go crazy" on a recent flight to Japan, Andrew Back feared he might end up as that evening's headline news.

"Everyone's switches suddenly controlled the lights for those in the seat behind them," he recalls. "After about 30 minutes or so they went back to normal. We never did find out why it happened."

But Back, an electrical engineer by profession, had his suspicions: electromagnetic interference, or EMI, may have short-circuited the lights. Radiation levels are considerably higher at 36,000 feet than on the ground.

It's not a pie-in-the-sky theory.

At one point during the TWA Flight 800 investigation, NASA researchers were looking into the possibility that errant EMI signals from ships, ground radars or other aircraft were strong enough to cause the spark that ignited the nearly empty center fuel tank on the Boeing 747, killing all 230 people on board.

EMI occurs naturally, too. Flight crews on commercial airlines receive up to four times the radiation levels experienced by the typical nuclear plant worker, delegates to a recent conference at Trinity College in Dublin were told. The sun is the primary culprit, delivering measurable doses of ionizing radiation at high altitudes.

And radiation isn't only affecting planes. It's also affecting passengers.

But the potential health risk is secondary, really, to what EMI could do to your livelihood. You would have to fly every day in order to receive more than one millisievert of radiation a year, which is equivalent to about 50 chest X-rays and believed to be the most radiation someone can safely absorb.

And, despite the talk of EMI bringing planes down, fact remains that flying is 33 times safer than driving, according to a University of Michigan study.

Worry about your laptop instead.

"Up at 36,000 feet, you get particles which penetrate soft things," says airline expert Terry Wiseman, publisher of the industry newsletter Airfax. He's heard of several cases in which data has been lost in-flight because of radiation. Sometimes it's from outside the aircraft, he adds, and sometimes it's from inside - faulty wiring in the electrical system that zaps a computer hard drive, for example.

The government, which is charged with ensuring that planes fly safely, is clueless about the risks that radiation poses to your personal electronics. In a Federal Register entry last year, the Aircraft Certification Service in Renton, Wash., admitted that "it is not possible to precisely define the radiation to which the airplane will be exposed in service. There is also uncertainty concerning the effectiveness of airframe shielding for radiation."

All of which means that you never know when your laptop is going to get zapped, or even if the data on your device will suffer as a result. (Portables and PDAs are tested for the radiation they emit, but generally not for the radiation they can withstand. If a manufacturer bothers evaluating it for the latter, the lab is usually at sea level - not cruising altitude.)

Remember the reports circulating on the Internet last year that claimed tray tables in the seats of Sabena A340 aircraft were magnetized and responsible for corrupting the disk drives of laptops? Although the Belgian airline and the International Air Transport Association vigorously denied the presence of magnets, I believe something happened up there.

But not because of magnets.

I think natural or artificial EMI signals are interfering with business. They're wreaking havoc on a plane's electronics, the health of the cabin crew and of the most frequent flyers, and our laptops. My theories remain unproven conjecture, but I find it disturbing that the government gives the radiation issue short shrift considering all that it already knows. It probably figures that as long as passengers are finding something else to blame for their data loss, or the flickering cabin lights, it's off the hook.

Given what we know, I also think it's stupid for airline crewmembers to accuse headsets, Game Boys and portable PCs of causing electromagnetic interference when it far likelier that the sun is frying an aircraft's electronics. I'm not saying our tech toys can't interfere with the safe operation of a plane, just that the crew shouldn't point the finger at travelers first.

My advice?

Back up your entire disk drive before you fly. In-flight data loss remains rare, but it could happen. The higher you climb, the stronger the radiation levels. So if you're taking the Concorde, be extra careful. If you fly very often, ask your doctor about the risk of radiation. Already, one European pilot's union is looking into the problem, and more are certain to follow.

Christopher Elliott is a travel commentator based in Annapolis, Md. All e-mailed questions may be edited, condensed or republished at the site's discretion. The Travel Technologist appears weekly on this site. This story was also published on Biztravel.com.