Ascot just sent me this link that I thought should be thrown into this discussion. It is an interview with Jim Meigs, the Editor-in-Chief of Popular Mechanics. The part about cellular phones is as follows:
So onto the cell phones..
Solomon: Yeah, tell me a bit about the claim that cell phones don't work above 8,000 feet, the plane was flying at 30,000 feet, how were those calls made?
Meigs: Yeah, the idea that cell phones don't work in airplanes comes up again and again, but apparently none of the conspiracy theorists ever bothered to call their cell company. We talked to leading engineers across the cell industry and they told us that cell phones work, not perfectly, but reasonably well in airplanes, up to 35,000 feet and more.
And if you think about it, this makes total sense. In a rural area, a cell phone call tower could cover a couple of hundred square miles. That would be, you know, perhaps 10 miles in either direction, and that would also include 10 miles up into the sky.
So, where you think about a plane flying through that region, the notion that it could pick up a cell phone tower actually stands to reason. Planes do move pretty fast, and so they move through these cell areas quickly, you might have a lot of dropped calls. And in fact, if you look through the records from Flight 93, that's exactly what happened. People did make calls, some of them were dropped, not all of them were completed, but they did get through.
Solomon: You know, I was on a plane last night, frankly, from Philadelphia, I tried to make a call - it didn't work. I tried last week, I'm on a plane somewhere almost every week, and I never can make a call. Has the technology changed? I thought it was getting better. This is one of those, sort of, every man goes and says 'well, I'm just going to take a flight and use my phone'. I never get a signal.
Meigs: What kind of cell phone do you have?
Solomon: Well, I actually tried with one of my producers too, on a different shoot, I had a blackberry, she had another cell phone. i guess that's all i'm saying is it doesn't work. I don't know, it's one of those things, it's not hard to verify, does that bother you at all?
Meigs: Well, are you saying that all the cell phone engineers that we talked are also in the plot?
Solomon: I'm not saying they're in on the plot, I'm just saying, it's one of those ones that's kind of easy to check, right?
Meigs: Well, yeah, we checked with cell phone engineers, they feel that cell phones work, with some problems, but do work in airplanes - not all the time, and probably better in rural areas than urban areas where the cell towers are said to cover less terrain. So I don't why your cell phone didn't work, but I'm not suspicious of the people in the engineering community who've worked on this, I'm not suspicious of their account.
And here's the other thing: we have evidence that the cell phones work because people called their friends and loved ones from the airplanes. You know, the conspiracy theory view that those cell phones couldn't have worked, then the next step is, 'so some kind of government computer voice simulation system, you know, imitated Mark Bingham's voice, and he talked to his mother, and she didn't know she was talking to a computer' - I mean, follow that logic, where does it lead you?
I don't know what "leading engineers" he spoke to, but if his next comment has anything to do with what these "engineers" told him about cell coverage, they spoke to the wrong people -- "That would be, you know, perhaps 10 miles in either direction, and that would also include 10 miles up into the sky." As I already pointed out before(and please reference that chart once again), coverage directly above the cellsite is not possible. This coverage has to come from a cell near the horizon away from the plane. And his question about what kind of cell phone does he have? What's this about? How is that relevant?
I can't even stomach going through the rest of the comments as they have already been hashed out over and over again. But I did find this funny:
Solomon: Well, I actually tried with one of my producers too, on a different shoot, I had a blackberry, she had another cell phone. i guess that's all i'm saying is it doesn't work. I don't know, it's one of those things, it's not hard to verify, does that bother you at all?
Meigs: Well, are you saying that all the cell phone engineers that we talked are also in the plot?
Solomon is yet another person who says he couldn't get his phone or his producer's to work either, over Philadelphia - a vastly covered cellular area. Meigs immediately gets defensive and basically asks Solomon if the "engineers" they talked to were involved in the plot too. Solomon should have asked Meigs if he has ever been able to call out on a plane seeing that he didn't offer that information on his own.
This is yet another example of a guy not knowing what he is talking about. He shouldn't presume to know it all when he can't even get the basics down on antenna propagation.
And here is another link given by Ascot on an interview with Lee Hamilton, 9/11 Commission Co-Chair.
Solomon: Where there any notion there was... The NTSB recently released the flight path of United Flight 93 in the past two weeks. One of the interesting things that that showed was, during the flight path, and I think the flight path of that, I think that plane crashed, according to the Report, at 10:03 am.
And one of the interesting things it showed - this is just recently declassified - that it flew well over 10,000 feet - 30,000, 40,000 feet - from about 9:30 onward. Now, a lot of the cell phone calls that were made from that plane, that ended up being in the movie, were from, you know, people phoning from the plane. And one allegation that's recently come out since the release of that is: cell phones don?t work above 10,000 feet, so how could people get on their cell phone on a plane and phone their relatives?
Hamilton: I?m no expert on that. I?ve been told cell phones work - sometimes - above 10,000 feet, and as high as 30,000 feet. So it may have been that some of the calls went through and some didn?t, I just don?t know.
Smart man. He's only been 'told' that cell phones work, but he just doesn't know. No real substance to this interview on cell phones.
