The 5G Threats To Airplanes Quietly Recedes 39
The July 1 deadline for the US airline industry came and went, and not much happened. "We're not aware of any disruptions specifically related to 5G over the weekend," wrote Ian Petchenik, director of communications for Flightradar24, on Monday. Mike Dano writes via Light Reading: Petchenik noted the flight-tracking company does not specifically collect data on the types of issues that delay flights. Regardless, the situation is remarkable considering warnings of "major disruptions," "chaos" and the possibility that "the nation's commerce will grind to a halt" if 5G gets too close to airplanes in the US. Broadly, the high-stakes standoff between the US wireless industry and the airline industry -- which kicked into high gear just over a year ago -- appears to be something that both sides now mostly want to forget.
No shit (Score:4, Funny)
The 5G got used up RC’ing people via vaccines.
again and again and again and ... (Score:1)
another Y2K-style manufactured freakout.
and no one ever seems to learn anything from them.
can you say "gullible"? sure you can.
Re:again and again and again and ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Two different scenarios. The Y2K shit was real, but was taken seriously so nothing happened. If there was a crack on a bridge and upon repair the bridge didn’t collapse, does that mean it was wrong to fix it?
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Neither Y2K nor a crack in a bridge are progenitors of the end of the world or airplanes crashing. Yet that is how these things get treated in the press. It's nothing more trhan a pure headline-grab. Perhaps a more-reasoned approach to these things than total freakout is indicated.
But that wouldn't get any press at all, now would it?
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Things can be real problems that require real work to fix and the press can sensationalize and exaggerate at the same time, they're not mutually exclusive.
Re: again and again and again and ... (Score:2)
and thing can be total bull, too. like airplanes crashing due to 5G. or all computers crashing. or...
it's mass manipulation for profit, plain an simple.
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The big worry around Y2K wasn't all computers crashing, it was the ancient ones that power plants still depended on to function. The other computers weren't going to crash, they just weren't going to turn on when the electricity went away and the modern world suddenly ended overnight. Plus the other nasty related consequences like a whole bunch of people quickly dying, societal unrest, etc, etc. That risk was very real.
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societal unrest
Thats communism, not tolerated
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On what 5G frequencies have the telcos deployed their new 5G hardware? Not all 5G freqs are in the same band.
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Y2K could have caused serious problems, since many mission-critical systems were not Y2K compliant. It didn't because the problems were fixed. Y2K was a real threat and could have caused a major disaster. Don't underestimate the sheer number of stupid bugs that were fixed.
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Two different scenarios. The Y2K shit was real, but was taken seriously so nothing happened. If there was a crack on a bridge and upon repair the bridge didn’t collapse, does that mean it was wrong to fix it?
You're mostly right ;) The winkie... is because you should be 100% right but the problem is not everyone took Y2K mitigation process seriously so there were some effects. In general time based systems don't use the calendar so they neither care about the year, or the year offset to start-year. For example, if your yard watering system turns on Mondays and Thursdays 0800-1000 it doesn't care what year it is, whether it's pre or post Y2K, etc.
Fundamentally it's a problem with HOW INFORMATION IS ENCODED whi
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Y2K was a real problem for older systems (Score:2)
Lot's of things people think will never be a problem can happen when systems run for far longer than the developers expected.
Don't forget, Janua [wikipedia.org]
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I think Y2k was a genuine problem with a straightforward solution mixed with millennialist doomsaying and humanity's natural fear of the future.
This was plain manipulation of the court of public opinion by manufacturers who had been cutting corners for years, and airlines who didn't want to pay for it. Of course, it helped because cell phones were involved so the "get off your phone" people would weigh in. And also the 5g nuts.
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Y2K WAS a real problem; I never intimated that it wasn't. I remember well going over my old programs working out how to take the 2-digit year field into a 4-digit field. What I said in my original post was about the "Y2K-style freakout", which has been repeated over and over for the profit of sensationalist media and ALWAYS results in the same non-event. My point was about the public's complete lack of learning and growth from its past BS freakouts.
Wash, rinse, freakout, repeat. That's the American way.
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My point is that this was much more pragmatic than Y2k. Y2k just had to be fixed. This episode was a competition between parts of the aviation industry that didn't want to clean up some of its hardware and the FCC that didn't want to leave valuable spectrum lying around.
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Old news (Score:3, Informative)
The FCC already did the testing to prove 5G was safe, but the airlines freaked out and the FAA backed them up. It turned out to be a pissing match between federal agencies, and the FAA was clearly in the wrong. But they felt they had to look vigilant after the 737Max fiasco.
Moral of the story: the FAA is still messed up.
Re:Old news (Score:5, Interesting)
No, the FCC tested it on current generation aircraft. Like the 737-MAX series of jets, and those were fine.
If you were flying older 737 series, you were screwed. Now, the big airlines like United and such, were migrating to the 737 MAX so this did nothing that speed up those plans. It was the smaller airlines as well as foreign airlines that had issues as they often flew the older equipment. Those airlines generally adapted by flying unaffected equipment to those airports instead, or retrofitting, or taking precautions (if you know you're going to get errorneous readings, then you use procedures where that equipment isn't working which might limit the weather you can accept).
So bad news if you want to fly a 737 non-MAX as those have basically been sold off to other airlines. The big guys simply swapped those routes with 737 MAX jets (just a little shuffling around, nothing major as it's 737 type compatible).
So yes, a y2k style yawner, only because once the problem was found, it was resolved - either flying new equipment, avoiding use of problematic equipment, or working around the problem. All perfectly acceptable solutions.
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No, you've really got the facts wrong and backwards. Existing radio altimeters were tested and certified by the FAA at a time when there was a large unused guard band between the frequencies that radio altimeters used and other radio communications. The FCC went ahead and repurposed radio bands for 5G that were adjacent to those used by radio altimeters without doing any ACTUAL testing of existing radio altimeters in use in aircraft. They did SIMULATED testing, and claimed everything would be fine. The
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Yes, the radar altimeters worked fine when they were manufactured because there was a huge guard band around the frequency, but the radar altimeters were supposed to reject signals outside the bandwidth assigned to that function. With no other signals in that range, it didn't matter if their receivers were not selective enough.
That's not how RF filters work at all. Or how spectrum assignment works.
The adjacent bands were assigned for fixed-service satellite, space-to-earth-station (satellite downlink) uses, and so the power observed by aircraft in adjacent bands was required to be low. This is important because real filters (those with finite delay) cannot have brick-wall frequency response where they attenuate a stopband to zero amplitude. Power in an adjustment band will leak through -- it is only a question of attenuation a
Re: We'll see (Score:1)
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Let us know when HAMs are measuring distances with better than one-meter precision, with nine 9s of reliability, several times a second with sub-second latency, while measuring crosstalk and interference. Then get back to us on what's easy to do.
(Nine 9s of reliability is from FAA AC 25.1309, which says that catastrophic events should have a probably of less than 10 to the -9 power. That math must be checked by an independent, technically qualified person -- and the process that ensures that things are rev
No problem (Score:2)
As a certified private pilot and as a ham operator (extra), I have an opinion on this. Avionics are hugely expensive. Probably because they have to meet all kinds of FAA and FCC regulations. I could not just buy a Baofeng radio or other device and shove it into the sleeve where my King or other radio used to reside. I don't remember the details, but one of my radios was old tube and one was transistor. They both worked, so I was fine with that.
Now, today, it is different.
Heh. (Score:1)
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If they did then then terrorists could get together a bunch of phones in an airport then activate them all at once during a flight.
OTOH there IS a type of altimeter that's known to be affected by 5G [google.com].
The truth is out there (Score:5, Informative)
OB Disc: I'm an FAA certificated commercial helicopter pilot who flies aircraft with radar altimeters.
TL;DR The media has conflated so many things that people opining on this are both right and wrong. This article is equally pointless. Details below
Media misses points:
1. It's not "an altimeter" issue. Altimeter measure mean sea-level (MSL) altitude using air pressure and are unaffected by any radio waves. Federa Air Regulations require them aboard all powered (engine) civil aircraft. https://www.ecfr.gov/current/t... [ecfr.gov]
2. It IS a radar altimeter issue. The radar altimeter does regular radio transmissions to time bounces off the ground showing how high above ground level (AGL) the aircraft is. They can be affected by lots of things including newer radio frequency band utilization.
3. It's been working in Europe with no problems and the FAA and airlines are just fighting it out because they're stupid. No, European frequency bands for the so-called 5G transmissions are different than the ones in the US. Radar altimeter manufacturers know there's a "guard band" of unallocated frequency space so they counted on that and made cheaper low-pass or high-pass filters knowing they had room to play. The allocation of the "5G band" tends to have made that a poor choice in the long term.
4. There are no unusual reports because the temporary fluctuation of a radar altimeter is normal, is neither an "accident" nor an "incident" and isn't subject to either FAA or NTSB reporting. So drawing conclusions from "it's been a few months and 5G hasn't made any difference on aircraft" is drawing conclusions from zero data. This is nonreportable stuff.
5. Aircraft do not land themselves. I know lots of media sources like to think they do, but they don't. Instrument landing of civil aircraft always involves a pilot at the decision height (DH) electing to proceed to touch down and land. The radar altimeter does not help that process. Instrument landing systems (ILS) include a lateral (right / left) indicator, called a localizer, and a glide slop indicator (GSI) indicating if you're on the 3deg or 5deg descent to the runway. The radar altimeter COULD be used to land the plane automatically in an emergency and its failure then would be un-good, but for normal ops the pilot at DH sees the runway and gets the aircraft down... or he/she elects to go-around or go-elsewhere.
Must be all those neurosurgeons doing brain surgeries on their iPhones using 5G that hurts planes. No, 5G isn't anything more than 4G+ or LTE+ ("Long Term Evolution+ which really is nonsense terms like NextGen Air Traffic Control or New-New-Old-Phoenix-Highway.)
The media has the unique ability to educate, demonstrate, and make us all smarter. Instead they spew out all this entirely inaccurate stuff.
5G isn't generational revolution over LTE.
Radar altimeters are not "an altimeter". They don't tell you altitude... just height above ground level.
Frequencies are different in Europe so their lack of interference means nothing in the US.
Neither EU nor US flights have to "report" radalt twitchiness so they don't so conclusions from zero data are worth zero.
E
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An actually informative post! Not seen one of those in a while. Thank you!
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As a systems engineer on an SBAS, my only quibbles with your comment are about point 5: First, Cat IIIc autoland is a thing, with no decision height or runway visual range limit. FAA AC 120-28D appendix 1 cites ICAO SARPs Annex 6 for that definition. Second, a number of sources say that RALTs are used to determine when to flare during autoland, so RALTs do play a supporting role there.
But the airplane, crew and airport all need to be fully qualified for any Cat III approach, and that capability is normall
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Correct.
But now consider the use of RADALT in helicopters. Not near designated airports, but in the middle of rural or urban areas. Possibly air ambulances or rescue operations in inclement weather. And what might happen if such a flight had to be aborted because they can't risk CFIT and their ground prox. warning system is undependable.
I bet undetectable Kobe Bryant wishes his pilot had or used a radio altimeter.
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Your point 3 is way off:
3. It's been working in Europe with no problems
No it wasn't. The French regulator did their own testing and identified problems. They instigated a 5G ban around airports while the issue was resolved. Australia where the guard band was even larger also did direct modelling showing an increase in uncertainty of measurement. In both cases the testing was done with old equipment for a specific reason (read on)
Radar altimeter manufacturers know there's a "guard band" of unallocated frequency space so they counted on that and made cheaper low-pass or high-pass filters knowing they had room to play. The allocation of the "5G band" tends to have made that a poor choice in the long term.
The guardband was not about being cheaper. It is clearly defined operational performance standard laid out in ITU-R M.2059-0.
Amazing! (Score:1)
Just like the late 90s when hospitals banned WiFi because it would surely kill patients by messing with IV pumps, monitoring equipment, pacemakers, etc.
Just gotta love hand-waving fearmongering.
Another perspective (Score:2)
I've been quietly wishing that the media would report this as an airplane issue rather than a 5G issue. The airlines have had plenty of time to upgrade their radar altimeters to versions that are less indiscriminate about "noise" from adjacent frequencies. They've passed at at least one previous deadline and this is the second (?) that they've missed. This issue didn't sneak up on them - they simply didn't act on it and the media keeps reporting it as if the phone carriers and the FCC are picking on the