Part 1 of 2
AT&T and Verizon expansion of nationwide 5G service, which was delayed for months because of concerns about airplane safety, kicked off on Wednesday without the travel chaos that airline executives had warned about. But the issues for airlines and wireless carriers are far from resolved, experts say.
The instrument in question is a radio altimeter. Developed in the 1920s, they help pilots determine a jet’s altitude and its distance from other objects. In some planes, altimeter readings are fed directly into automated systems that can act without input from pilots, reports The New York Times.
Aviation experts warned that 5G interference could have rare but catastrophic consequences for air travel, as some planes may not be able to land at airports near 5G towers. “You do not want to be on planes landing without the altimeter working,” Diana Furchtgott-Roth, a former deputy secretary at the Department of Transportation in charge of researching new technologies, told The New York Times. She added that aviation regulators were correct in raising concerns about 5G on C-band and were taking appropriate steps to ensure safety.
But telecom experts say that there is little or no risk to altimeters from 5G and that the aviation business has had years to prepare for what little risk there is. “The science is pretty clear — it is hard to repeal the laws of physics,” according to former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler. In an Op Ed for the Brookings Institution in November, he noted that FCC engineers had found no real cause for concern.
AT&T and Verizon agreed to a third delay of their 5G rollout on C-band, saying they’d temporarily restrict 5G in a two-mile buffer zone around a number of large airports.
The start of 5G has been years in the making, raising questions about why airlines, the FAA, the wireless companies and the FCC did not resolve them earlier.
Furchtgott-Roth told The Times previous warnings from aviation experts were ignored. She said that in December 2020, the Transportation Department sent a letter to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration warning that allowing 5G to operate in its proposed frequency band would cause problems for flight safety systems. She said that letter was never passed along to the FCC and to wireless companies.
Instead, the FCC, relying on its own research that cleared 5G of safety concerns, went ahead with a planned auction when Ajit Pai was Chairman. Carriers bid more than $80 billion to use that portion of the wireless spectrum for 5G.
Pai told Fox Business this week that 5G will “absolutely not” bring down planes. “For two years, when I was the chairman of the FCC, we studied this issue very carefully and we found no credible evidence that there’d be harmful interference to altimeters.”
“So all of these concerns we find that are being litigated well after the auction even happened are just misplaced,” Pai said. “There’s no science behind any of it.”
Pai said the FAA was “behind the curve” on the matter, since the agency had been notified back in 2018, to express any concerns leading up to 5G implementation. He said the fear the FAA is pushing that planes will fall from the sky due to 5G, “is not based on science and engineering.” Look for Part 2 on Monday – What Happens Now?
By Leslie Stimson, Inside Towers Washington Bureau Chief
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