Free Republic

Steven Spriggs was stopped in a traffic jam near downtown Fresno and thought nothing of whipping out his iPhone 4 and clicking on the map feature to see if there was an alternate route around the construction mess. He was startled when he looked up and saw a California Highway Patrol motorcycle officer ordering him to pull over. He showed the officer that he was looking at a map and not texting or talking. “Pull over,” Spriggs recalled the officer as saying. “It’s in your hand.” A little more than a year later, Spriggs is at the heart of a...

(Newser) – Texting while flying may have been a major factor in the 2011 crash of an emergency medical helicopter, according to National Transportation Safety Board investigators. Pilot James Freudenbert died along with three other people when he crashed in Missouri after running out of fuel. The NTSB, implicating distraction caused by cell phone use in a commercial aviation crash for the first time, found that Freudenbert sent and received seven messages during the flight, Bloomberg reports. Freudenbert, who was arranging dinner with a coworker, was breaking company rules by using an electronic device while at the controls. "This is...