原创 Dell's smells and use of electronics during flight

Two stories jumped out at me in the past few weeks. The first was the long-anticipated announcement by the United States' Federal Aviation Administration that passengers will be able to use personal electronic devices during all phases of flight, which now notably includes take-offs and landings. The policy denying their use has been frustrating for many in the engineering community (and Alec Baldwin, who is definitely not a member of the engineering community) due to the questionable technical merit of the conclusion that personal electronics can interfere with aircraft systems.

The second story was about reports of Dell's 6430u laptop smelling like cat urine. Dell determined there was no biological or health hazard but instead blamed it on a manufacturing process that they've since corrected. I currently use an earlier generation of Dell's Latitude laptops and will soon be shopping around for a new one, so I'm going to have to factor this into the buying process now. Compared to battery life or weight, fragrance was lower on my criteria for a laptop, but maybe I need to reconsider.

Both of these examples offer an interesting observation about test and measurement: "quality" includes more than just a pass or fail grade on target specifications. With the FAA, they were presented with scores of data, much of which came from studies they commissioned, showing no impact from personal electronic devices on the aircraft systems, yet the ban persisted. Many have speculated the real reason for the ban was to either keep your attention focused on the flight crew or reduce the amount of things that could get airborne (aside from you and the aircraft) if an emergency occurred. Either way, they continued relating the problem to wireless interference, regardless of the data, and it made (some) uninformed travelers feel good that The FAA was being overly cautious in the face of that ever-present fear of a plane crash. It will be really devastating to our reasonable minds if customers ever choose airlines that still impose the ban because they assume it will be safer.

(Note: as a frequent flier, I fully support a ban on phone conversations during flight. I don't need data to tell me how annoyed I would be if that became a regular occurrence.)

With the cat urine, envision the following scenario occurring at a test system verification meeting:

"Our test system verifies the function of all the major electrical systems of the PC and confirms the software is loaded correctly," said the test engineer. "The only thing we haven't verified is whether it smells like cat urine, and I have this electronic nose all ready to go."

"Wipe the nose! (pun intended)," said the obstinate product manager. "We've done countless focus groups, and nobody cares about the smell. Ship it!"

I doubt the product manager would feel bad about that decision (which certainly wasn't made) even with the news reports. Quality is a moving target, as much influenced by trends, competitors, brand perception, or even a person's hatred of cats. You can test everything imaginable and still miss something, or test exactly what you're looking for and have no one care.

And just to close the loop on these two examples, I understand you'll still be stopped from using a laptop (regardless of the smell) during take-offs and landings. Maybe it's time to make the switch towards that tablet PC after all.

Luke Schreier is the senior group manager for automated test platform marketing at National Instruments. He joined NI in 2001 as an applications engineer before transitioning to product management in 2003. His focus areas in marketing have included switching, precision DC, signal connectivity, high-speed digital and mixed-signal test, and now the entire suite of PXI platform products and modular instruments. His current focus is on product strategy and lead-user activities for next-generation modular instruments and PXI platform products as well as participation in regional advisory councils and cross-industry test leadership activities. He holds a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.