Laptop Ban for Pilots
The Hill reports that Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) will introduce a bill to ban pilots from using laptops during flight. The Hill isn’t aviation press of course, and the bill is probably too early in its drafting for any detail. But not all pilots are airline pilots. And not all laptops are what you might think of as laptops either.
Pilots can be private pilots, commercial pilots, and air transport pilots. The latter two categories can be paid for their piloting services - most airline pilots are the latter category. The majority of all flights are not airline flights either only about 10% are airlines. The others are “general aviation”. I hope the eventual bill takes into account the widely varied types of both pilots and flying that happens in the use.
Some laptops and some ebook readers like Kindles are starting to be used for electronic map displays, storing and displaying approach plates for instrument approaches, and for storing and displaying airport and facility directory information. There are specialized devices for this, but more and more are off-the-shelf commercial laptops.
I hope the bill takes into account this use of laptops and computing devices as well as the different types of pilots and of all the non-airline kinds of flying that take place.
Note also that the NWA Minneapolis incident was not an emergency, nor was an accident either. It was an incident; something that might have been a more serious matter but ended with no harm to anyone and no damage to any aircraft. The only damage is to the pilot’s careers. The key here is to learn from this incident and future avoid situations that might become emergencies instead of contributing to panic. We can be bad at estimating risk.