What You Need to Know About5G and Flying

Pilots use altimeters to determine an aircraft’s altitude or height in the air. TPG readers have two types of altimeters on the plane: a radio altimeter or a barometric altimeter. Pilots most commonly use barometric altimeters, and it’s used to determine altitude above mean sea level. The radio altimeter determines the aircraft’s exact location by bouncing radio waves off the terrain below and only works from the ground up to several thousand feet.

Pilots will use radio altimeters when approaching airports with poor visibility (ex., fog). These landings are determined on a minimum height that the pilots can see the approaching lighting system, also known as the decision height. If the pilots don’t see the lights or runway, they must execute what’s called a missed approach and wait for weather conditions to get better, and if they don’t, find another airport to land at.

Low-visibility approaches require pilots to use radio altimeters for guidance on how high they are since they won’t have any visibility until right before touchdown. Aircrafts conducting automatic landings in low visibility also rely on radio altimeter data. Radio altimeters also have digital height callouts (ex. “50, 40, 30, 20, 10”), helping the pilot better understand where they are.

All of this being said, when AT&T and Verizon announced that they would turn on their 5G wireless communications via the C-band spectrum, the alarm bells in the airline industry sounded off. There was a study conducted in 2020 that showed 5G transmissions in the C-band spectrum affect radio altimeters on aircrafts and that there are “major risks” that these systems “will cause harmful interference to radar altimeters on all civil aircraft.” These radio altimeters operate in an adjacent spectrum to 5G C-Band and are susceptible to interference.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) sees this as a significant safety issue. It is immediately building a process to determine rules for when an airport is near 5G C-band towers. It’s important to note that the FAA does not take issue with 5G devices, just the 5G C-band towers.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) sees this as a significant safety issue. It is immediately building a process to determine rules for when an airport is near 5G C-band towers. It’s important to note that the FAA does not take issue with 5G devices, just the 5G C-band towers.

https://5ginsider.com/faq/what-you-need-to-know-about-5g-and-flying/

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Aviation, telecom groups agree to share data to help resolve5G safety concerns

Aviation and telecom groups said Wednesday they will share data to help resolve safety concerns related to new 5G wireless service, which Verizon Communications and AT&T are slated to roll out on Jan. 5.

“We are pleased that after productive discussions we will be working together to share the available data from all parties to identify the specific areas of concern for aviation,” wireless trade group CTIA, Airlines for America and the Aerospace Industries Association said in a joint statement.

The Federal Aviation Administration last month raised concerns that the 5G service could interfere with aircraft radio altimeters. Earlier this month it issued an order that could prohibit pilots from using radio altimeters to land when visibility is low.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/22/aviation-telecom-groups-agree-to-share-data-to-help-resolve-5g-safety-concerns.html

The CTIA has said the service upgrade would not interfere with those altimeters and has noted that other countries have rolled out 5G without issues.

“The FAA is encouraged that avionics manufacturers and wireless companies are taking steps to test how dozens of radio altimeters will perform in the high-powered 5G environment envisioned for the United States,” the agency said in a statement.

Airline executives last week warned of costly flight disruptions due to the problem. Such flight cancellations, if they were to occur, would come as the industry is looking to recover from the Covid-19 pandemic.

“If we go back to decades-old procedures and technology for flying airplanes, cancel thousands of flights per day … it will be a catastrophic failure of government,” United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby told reporters after a Senate hearing on Dec. 15.

The CEOs of Boeing and Airbus on Monday wrote to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to support a delay to the 5G rollout and proposed limiting cellular transmissions near airports where those radio altimeters would be used.

The FCC did not comment on a potential delay to the rollout but said: “We remain optimistic that we will resolve outstanding issues to launch 5G to meet the country’s evolving needs.”

Physics World announces itsfinalists for the 2021 Breakthrough of the Year

Restoring speech in a paralysed man

Making 30 lasers emit as one

Quantifying wave–particle duality

Milestone for laser fusion

Innovative particle cooling techniques

Observing a black hole’s magnetic field

Achieving coherent quantum control of nuclei

Entangling two macroscopic objects

Observing Pauli blocking in ultracold fermionic gases

Confirming the muon’s theory-defying magnetism

https://physicsworld.com/a/physics-world-announces-its-finalists-for-the-2021-breakthrough-of-the-year/