Even with today's agreement to restrict 5G deployment near airports, several airlines have announced flight cancellations:
Emirates, Air India, ANA, and Japan Airlines have all announced they’re canceling some flights to the US due to this week’s rollout of C-band 5G over concerns it could potentially interfere with some instruments....ANA cites specific guidance from Boeing, saying that “Boeing has announced flight restrictions on all airlines operating the Boeing 777 aircraft.” Japan Airlines also cites a notification from Boeing, saying that it was told that “5G signals for U.S. mobile phones, which will begin operating in the U.S. on January 19, 2022, may interfere with the radio wave altimeter installed on the Boeing 777.”
Among domestic airlines, Delta said it is preparing for possible flight cancellations in bad weather. Other airlines haven't announced anything yet. I wonder how far it will go?
Just don't blame this on the FAA. The FCC under Idjit Pai has completely ignored the concerns of stakeholders other than the communications companies. The NWS had, and still has concerns about how the allowed 5G bands will affect weather forecasts because they do not have a wide enough guard band to prevent interference with the satellite measurements of water vapor.
That motherfucker has pissed me off more than any other bureaucrat appointed by Trump. He is an idiot and a tool.
but Biden will be blamed...
The newer aircraft should just need to be certified. The older equipment might have problems. But you're right, there was no need for this.
And when he is blamed the Democrats won't defend him, to a man they'll act like they were caught fair and square.
Bernie & his Squadratic droogs will blame a corporatist establishment beholden to monopolistic aerospace industry that puts profit over people. The GQP will blame scientists for trying to kill God. Shitlibs will be upset that Biden-Harris didn't have a blue ribbon panel to preemptively assess & correct every possible problem that could arise.
Got it one, old son! Sad, how easy it is to call the tune before it's played. And by rote, at that.
Biden’s motto should’ve been a new broom sweeps clean. He undoubtedly will be blamed for everything and should’ve understood that and acted accordingly.
He needs to bounce every Trump appointee. By hook or by crook, they needed to be gone. Every last one.
Pai resigned as soon as Biden took office. The FCC chairwoman now is Jessica Rosenworcel, originally an Obama appointee. No idea what her involvement in this cockup has been.
Everyone with the Trump taint needs to be gone. And Biden needs to appoint people who share his agenda rather than someone else’s because he’s the one who gets the blame when there’s a problem. You can’t let things drift and hope that everyone does the right thing.
I am perennially shocked Democrats never do this.
It's like volunteering to buy bullets for your executioner.
Apparently, Charles Guiteau did nothing wrong.
Blamed for what?? This is already old news and frankly airline driven stupidity. It will be old news soon enough. But please Gomoron, keep posting. Your the biggest idiot that posts on here, day after day.
If we were going to have interference issues, we"d have seen it by now. I agree on your assessment of Pai, but this is also a matter of procrastination on the airline industry's part. They should have been testing this decades ago, but nope.
This wasn't an issue decades ago. Europe has wider guard bands. The auction here in 2020 was done over FAA objections.
It literally was an issue. We've been using more of the spectrum on hand held devices, and aircraft should be certified against a wide range of frequencies rather than just not,
Agreed with golack. Decades ago, there weren’t cell phone towers anywhere. Also, the airplanes were there first in the frequency… why should they have to change what they do when newcomers (cell phone companies) move in? It’s like expecting aircraft to change their landing patterns that they’ve been using since the mid 20th Century after your subdivision is built underneath them.
Decades ago we were just asked not to use them.
We should have begun testing instead of heads-in-sand ala the 737-max issue.
Is there a single case in recorded history of cell phones in a plane causing trouble? And yet we get this idiotic routine of “switch off your electronics” at the beginning and end of every flight…
So yeah, my prior is to not trust anything the Airlines have to say about this; they have utterly burned their credibility in this space.
It's not so much because cell signals interfere with the airplane's equipment, it's that thousands of cell phones in the air every day attempting to connect with multiple on-the-ground towers sucks up a lot of bandwidth and could impair cell service. You're unlikely to actually be able to connect with anything at 30,000 feet flying 600 mph, but all the attempts collectively if everyone kept their phones on could be disruptive. According to the FCC and FAA.
Shh. Americans don’t believe negative consequences ever can collectively stem from individual choices. My choice to not wear a mask or cheat on my taxes or dump toxic chemicals in my backyard or what-have-you have no impact on anyone else. Freedom means never having to consider others in your decision making.
+1, dammit.
Attacking a strawman of your own construction may engender cheers from your friends, but it will not convince anyone who does not agree with you; it will not even make you a better person or one who has thought through the issue more carefully.
This is not an issue of "we have a well-known harm that results from many people all doing X"; the disagreement is precisely about whether any such harm even exists, regardless of how many people do it, and if so what the quantifications of this harm are.
The analogy is not "my toxic waste will not harm you"; the analogy is "if you refuse to pray to god along with the rest of us on Sunday, then you will make god mad and endanger all of us".
Nonsense. There are known physical mechanisms which raise the potential for interference with navigational instruments. If it was important enough to the wireless providers or the airlines to quantify the risk, they would pay for the research to do so. Otherwise, the air transport system will err on the side of caution.
You turn off your cell phone for takeoff and landing. The vast majority of bad things happen then and the crew members may need your absolute attention. It is for you, the passenger.
No. You are required to put your phone in airplane mode, not turn it off; and you are required to *keep* it in airplane mode throughout the flight.
It is clearly not about crew members needing your attention.
That's true, and not true. The systems work fine at 600mph. All the connections and disconnections are disruptive, but to the ground stations, not the planes.
That part is true, yes, that this is to the benefit of the cell companies, not anything to do with airline safety.
But
(a) that's not what we are told. We are told it will crash the plane AND
(b) that has fsckall to do with the generic "switch off every piece of electronics you own, even if it doesn't broadcast to cell towers" message.
(c) It's unclear to me (and as far as I can tell, to anyone else) if this propose calamity on the cellular side is actually real. As far I as know it has never been demonstrated (not the attempt to connect to a cell tower, but the calamity resulting from it). What is known is that on practically every flight there are a few cellular devices left on by mistake (or they were packed in luggage, or whatever) and they don't seem to hurt anything...
That's my point. The airlines have comported themselves as clueless twits who understand nothing about the differences in different electronic technologies and who have been happy to lie to the public for years. I'm unclear why a group with that particular track record should now be someone I should listen to.
Because they know how to fly multi engine jet transports safely and you don’t?
Maynard: “The airlines have comported themselves as clueless twits who understand nothing about the differences in different electronic technologies”
This runs on steam?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_cockpit#/media/File:Airbus_A380_cockpit.jpg
I always said he should be hit by a bus.
Having flown in the US for the first time in 2 years over the New Year's holiday, I found the multiple cancellations for "weather" specious. Yes there was weather elsewhere, but not at our origin, transfer, or designation.... Nor at any of the locales through which our planes had been scheduled to fly before they came to our port of departure.
I get that the airlines (as are hospitals) are hindered by staff being sick during the latest wave of COVID-19. As a passenger, if they don't have staff (or other operational/mechanical issues), they typically pay for hotel or other arrangements. As long as they can claim "weather," it's on the passenger to deal with it.... and pay for it, whether hotel, flight changes, or getting home from an "alternate destination."
With the 5G roll-out, how long will it be before they call all these delays/cancellations "weather" rather than "our equipment is inadequate for the modern 5G era." At one level, I can't blame the carriers, but I know the paying passengers will pay that much more... one way or another.
Keep in mind that the weather not only has to be good enough at your departure and destination points, but also at the crew's origin point. Airlines don't keep crews stationed at all of the airports they fly to. Generally, the crew is flying from somewhere in order to man the plane you'll be flying. So, weather problems cascade outwards to places that are not themselves experiencing bad weather.
And any point the aircraft (or its parts) had to fly through!
Shh. Americans don’t believe in domino problems or the butterfly effect. They don’t generally see any cause-and-effect beyond the immediate… so the idea that something happening thousands of miles away might impact something that impacts something else… that impacts you personally simply cannot be grokked by the average American. Alls I knows is my flight was delayed so the airline’s excuses about how something that happened 12 hours ago 3 time zones away are bullshit!
This is pretty funny.
Why is this a problem?
Limit areas around airports to 4G. Cell phone carriers could REDUCE the price for this service to KEEP their customer counts high (which is the main driver of their performance).
And Airlines could operate safely
There's no evidence of interference yet, either
Yeah, until a plane actually crashes, it's not a problem.
Until it crashes??? Where is proof of a "crash"??? Nothing more than hype.
Ya know, there's more than 'a crash' to tell if there's interference.
Limiting the areas around airports would render large swathes of metro areas unserved by 5G... and quite possibly render building 5G networks uneconomical for cell phone providers. (I mean, why bother building a 5G network in metro Boston, NYC, Philly or DC if you can't deliver 5G to the actual central cities where the most people live and/or work that are also within just 1-3 miles of active runways?)
C-band is 4GHz in width; if widening the guardband a few hundred MHz can fix the problem, how would that make 5G uneconomic? Also, we’re talking about frequencies that are easily focused into narrow beams; ISTM that 5G signals could be kept out of flightpaths.
Ken
You could, if memory serves, create dead spots by directing beams in certain specific paths. But this might require a little work be put in.
Damn I wish the Brits had seized the airports during the revolution. It would be their problem now instead of ours
😂
I forgot TFG asserted that. Just like all his other assertions.
As I mentioned on yesterday's post, the FAA/FTC really should have figured all this out in the past year, but I guess we (the public in the US) need to see actual cancelled flights or aircraft unable to land in bad weather and flights get diverted to other airports for anything to get done.
For the more morbid among you, here is an example of how a faulty radio altimeter led to a crash, even though the pilots were aware of the malfunction:
https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/test-article-the-crash-of-turkish-airlines-flight-1951-440326b3bd9a
Anything that grounds the entire 777 fleet, at least in the United airlines configuration, is a godsend. I would still like to know what genius decided that the center overhead bins should be just an inch or so too short to accommodate standard size carry on bags.
It was called "Working Together". I was at one of the ATA intros to the plane back in the 1990s. Boeing and its customers, the airlines and haulers, worked together on the design for the new generation aircraft. I was given the impression it was a serious collaboration. Passengers, you'll notice were not part of that "together".
The same design team apparently does mass transit now as the extremely passenger friendly PCC cars have been replaced pretty much everywhere with grotesquely uncomfortable buses and trolleys with extremely limited hard plastic seats that mostly face sideways. The theory seems to be if you made transit too appealing, too many people would use it and you would have to expand service, and that costs money. SF keeps them around for the tourists, and in case somebody wants to use them in a movie but it is so depressing to see how crappy the current carriages are compared to what was available 80 years ago.
United charging for checked bags notwithstanding, anything that discourages people from bringing all their worldly possessions into the cabin is a good thing.
Henry Rollins made this point back in 1998 on the Think Tank lp.
I feel like my argument for less travel in general got a boost
You'd think after years of Covid that they'd know what to do with 5G, being the same virus and all...
Sounds like another Y2K hype. It will fade out the same way.
Airlines not really at a high mark for leverage/influence at the moment, and seems odd we can't get to the truth(iness) of this matter.
If anyone is still reading this thread, and wondering why there isn’t a fully researched answer to the 5G/radar altimeter issue, here is some information about the FAA’s Flight Inspection Services, which conducts surveillance of electronic navigation systems at US airports. This requires a fleet of specially instrumented aircraft (e.g. N85, https://www.airport-data.com/aircraft/N85.html ) flying some 15,000 - 20,000 hours per year, as of 2010 ( https://shareok.org/bitstream/handle/11244/25669/KEITH_okstate_0664D_13676.pdf;jsessionid=E8A0EED99F9BAA07C456284B99B6ADED?sequence=1 ). I believe these flights also require special ground equipment to be pre-positioned at the airport. Extensive data recording is required https://www.faa.gov/documentLibrary/media/Order/8240_36L1.pdf
I think this shows the meticulous approach of the FAA to validating avionics systems. And yes, the organization is conservative in its considerations of innovation. The air transport system has improved safety by orders of magnitude over decades, and there is a strong bias to ensuring that no changes will negatively impact that trend.
Disclosure: I am retired from several contractors for the FAA WJ Hughes Technical Center; my work supported research in human performance in air traffic control. I once worked for Honeywell, Inc., a manufacturer of radar altimeters. I have no remaining financial interest in any of these companies. I have a remaining respect for the expertise of the personnel at the WJHTC, and the
FAA. (sorry, inadvertent post before completion).
Ah, the other point is, this stuff is expensive and takes time. The wireless carriers should have ponied up from the start.
Either the wireless carriers or the FTC should have funded the FAA testing using the $81B received from the wireless carriers who won the spectrum auction last year. All this should have been done prior to the current 5G rollout. I am all for faster cell service but I think air safety is more important than being able to watch 4K content on my Iphone's 6 inch screen while waiting for a flight at JFK.