Tuesday, January 18, 2022

Flight Dusruptions

 It seems that there is a brouhaha building between the cell phone industry and the commercial flight industry.  Evidently, the roll-out of 5G technology might affect flight-safety technology.

(AP) - AT&T will postpone new wireless service near some airports planned for this week after the nation’s largest airlines said the service would interfere with aircraft technology and cause massive flight disruptions.

From what I understand, the 5G towers use a frequency band that is close to the band used by radar altimeters.  The airlines are worried that spurious signals from the 5G towers could play havoc with their altimeters, which are used for landing and terrain avoidance. 

Slamming a plane into the ground is a major flight disruption, no doubt about it.

I'm no aviator, but seems like it might be a problem.

UPDATE** Blancolario explains the issues.


4 comments:

Glypto Dropem said...

Don't forget the conspiracy theories about 5G and the jabs. One says turning on the 5G will kill off those that got mRNA jabs, while the other says it will be for remote control of the nanobots that were injected with all the jabs. So stupid.

Jonathan H said...

There are legitimate concerns about frequency interference, though I doubt they would get anywhere near the level of aircraft accidents.

One issue is that wide band technologies have "fuzzy" edges for lack of a better word and they are new enough that how the "fuzz" affects nearby signals isn't fully understood.

Judy said...

Damn...where have I seen this kind of lunacy before? Ah, yes, before I retired from a Defense Contractor I worked for. The big muckety-mucks would decide we were going to implement some big change without having talked to everyone. Then, when someone said, "Are you sure that's a good idea?" Those people would be dismissed as resistive to change. Then, the whole thing would blow-up in their faces because they didn't listen. How many years have folks been expressing concerns over 5G?

TechieDude said...

I'm dubious about all this excitement over 5G. Wonder what the real story is.

I worked with carrier networking gear for years. Not wifi so much (although some) but the optical networks that interconnect these towers.

Getting a carrier to commit to purchase gear processes at a glaciers pace. It'll take months just to get your gear in their labs. And that just starts the very long testing process.

I guarantee towers have had 5G lit up for years. They've been deploying it for years, and there were years of testing before, no doubt. Just because no one has it yet doesn't mean it's not live.

No way they're just discovering this.

Unless, of course, there's political bullshit going on and regulators and politicians are paid off to make it happen. Given the split of the FCC, I seriously doubt it.