In the immortal words of Erik Wolpaw, “isn’t it about time somebody at NASA finally got around to Gameboy-proofing these fucking jets?”

Consumer Affairs has a report from Carnegie Mellon University indicating that Gameboy interference on commercial airliners may be far greater than we ever could have possibly imagined. A cellular telephone, idly powered on during a trans-Atlantic flight, may be the subtle nudge it takes for your Airjet to suddenly cartwheel out of the sky and into the big drink, to be devoured by subaqueous Dagon.

Naturally, no hard numbers are offered on the probability of any this. Although “alarming increases in probability” are terribly concerning, they are pretty much meaningless without actually citing some numbers. If the chance of any one cell phone causing an airplane to spontaneously explode was previously believed to be 1 in a Trillion and is now merely 1 in a Billion, you can probably all continue to call 1-900 numbers on your cross-country flights with impunity.

Link: Study Warns Cell Phones Could Cause Airliner Crash

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