That’s insightful, if the FAA was a part of defining the wireless spectrum, perhaps they would have time to do testing before it’s released…
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AT&T and Verizon Delay 5G Expansion to Address Aircraft Interference Concerns
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Not entirely correct. You are thinking of mmWave (n260 and n261). UWB is more of a generic term that covers both mmWave and C-band. All phones support C-band. (n77, n78, n79)
So what you are saying is, the 5G mind control rays are making the pilot think he is someplace else? </snark>
I remember one time I was in an aircraft and thought I was turning off my phone. In fact, I swept the "Dial 911" slider. When I landed I pictured an entire line of very confused cops speeding from NY to LA.
5g is a joke anyways. Im still waiting for LTE to give what was promised. The fastest LTE I ever saw was when the iPhone 5 first launched and barely anyone was in it yet. It hasn’t been nearly that fast since
i have no idea what the FAA thinks potential interference could do but know this about radio altimeters...
the autopilot and pilot do NOT use a radio altimeter to control the aircraft, we look at a barometric pressure altimeter for that. the radio altimeter is sort of an additonal / backup way of measuring height above the terrain directly below the aircraft when close to the ground, again sort of like a depth finder on a boat measures the distance to the bottom. in theory you could have 3 failures... either the radio altimeter STOPS reading anything, it reads inaccurately low, or inaccurately high. none of those are disasters by themselves but since the radio altimeter is used in alterating you could have lack of emergency alerting (there is a different issue and you are getting too low / descending too fast etc. but because it isn't working you don't get an alert) or false alerts (everything is normal but the radio altimeter thinks you are too low and warns you, potentially causing a needless go-around). these are unlikely and again the radio altimeter can't make the airplane do anything bad, if it doesn't work properly it can just cause another line of defense against OTHER issues to be missing.
There was a guy on PBS that did a special expose on the crap the telcoms have been pulling. It turns out we have paid for fiber to our homes over and over foe years because they would go to Congress, swear they could deliver fiber to homes if they got more money. Congress gave them the money, and they would come back apologizing because ;it's a bigger job than we though, but can we keep the money?' and Congress int heir infinite wisdom would let them keep the money!
Bill Moyers!!! I think it's his spot called 'Susan Crawford on Why U.S. Internet Access is Slow, Costly, and Unfair'
As a passenger, it is comical that they X-ray my ***** shoes, but then this cellphone that will crash the plane? We trust you to turn it off.
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Or they simply don’t care about safety (or not as much)? I know majority of Asian countries don’t. Just looks at their road safety records and pollution.
The sun-ward side of the planet experienced a 'G3 solar geomagnetic storm' today. It could interfere with radio communications, and navigating equipment, but it's so generally rare, it's not much of a threat. The sun would be far worse than a cell phone, any day...
The issue has nothing to do with your mobile phone on an airplane but rather the 5G towers near airports.
I’m pretty sure that myth busters showed that cell phones do not affect airplane equipment when cellular radios are left on during flight. I seem to remember them saying that if cell phones had radios that were way more powerful and every passenger had one of those super phones that it might. But the FAA is always extra careful.
I found the old Mythbusters video on YouTube from 8 years ago but it says I have to pay to watch it again (YouTube premium?). Anyway, my memory may not be perfect on that one so if anybody wants to watch it and share, please reply and let us all know — I may have it completely wrong. I’m hardly an authority on electromagnetic interference.
While alerting is part of the story, radio altimeters are not just for GPWS etc in modern airliners. As others have stated, and brought up the Turkish Airlines crash, radio altimeters are used by various aircraft systems whenever at low altitude.
I'm a Boeing 777 pilot, so can only speak specifically about it, but other Boeing models work similarly. The autothrottle is typically kept engaged on most approaches. When the radio altitude decreases to around 25' (depending on conditions), the thrust levers are automatically brought to idle. Obviously, this happening at random without warning is not conducive to a stable or safe approach. Yes, we are supposed to be following through with a hand on the levers, but unexpected abnormal behaviour is not good for safety. This is exactly what unfortunately happened to the Turkish Airlines flight.
On takeoff, lateral navigation engagement is triggered by radio altitude (50').
The most dangerous case is of course low-visibility operations which are almost entirely predicated on radio altitude, including the decision height (lowest permitted height above the runway without visual contact), and the aircraft reorienting and flaring for a safe touchdown. A loss of radio altimeter data during an autoland would be very dangerous (again, see the Turkish Airlines accident). Already, for redundancy, it is a requirement that two of the three independent radio altimeter systems are fully functional before attempting a low-visibility approach, so the ability of some ground based system to disrupt multiple systems' signals simultaneously is a significant hazard.
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I actually fly the 737 including the -800 like in the Turkish accident, however my airline flies all CAT III approaches by hand using the HUD and no A/T engaged so it isn’t quite the same. That accident is extremely unique in the manner of the RA failure and the delayed appearance of a comparator flag. The Captain finally at some point in the accident chain saw the discrepancy yet inexplicably failed to call for a go-around. The A/T were brought back I believe descending through 1000 ft (or maybe even higher) and went unnoticed by the crew until stick shaker and the flying pilot, the FO, began recovering yet was stopped by the CA who tried to save the approach only to let it get worse. Total mess. My only point in the original post (which pointed out the many uses of the RA) is that alone RA shouldn’t be thought of as a sole source means of aircraft control which alone can cause an accident (nothing should be such a sole source) but rather a tool in our box that when removed decreases safety unacceptably. I think often the public thinks the removal or disruption of a single system like this means a loss of the aircraft and certainly that should never be the case.
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Who cares about aircraft when we can download a hundred songs in the blink of an eye??
They wont stop the progress because their steel bird toy won’t flight straight no more. Plus aircraft are polluting the very air we breathe
They wont stop the progress because their steel bird toy won’t flight straight no more. Plus aircraft are polluting the very air we breathe
Agreed, there were many factors that led from the RA fault to the crash, that I'd hope our airlines' SOPs, when followed, wouldn't allow to end that way – and the loss of RA alone should never lead to a hull loss.
That said, in LVO specifically RA does have an outsize importance to safety and I wouldn't enjoy my jet going to IDLE | ROLLOUT | FLARE at 200' in IMC!
I would hope and assume that the interference would result in weird readings and a miscompare that triggers a NO AUTOLAND message and off we go on a missed approach, rather than just going to zero, though.
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Verizon sucks balls and service sucks in LI NY
Look I need C-Band the hell with them airplanes. We have 5g phones and we must use them to the maximum
Paid by making promises to their loyal customers then breaking them and upping their bills with no recourse
…. , but to worry about coverage , lack of backhauls, backup generators, outsourced CS,……
Nothing against TMUS. Every company has pros and cons.
This is sad tha VZ spent billionsfor the spectrum, billions for the CAPEX and now they cannot use it. Att is in better shape they swap back to VZ this portion of C-band.
IMHO it is very sttrange that it happens almost at the end of auction 110.
Cell phones interfering with flight control is a modern day myth - part of the security theater that happens on flights.
In my estimate at between 5% to 10% of people on any given flight will simply forget to turn off their phones.
That means on any flight ever there have been betwee 1 and 30 active cell phones - looking back into the past here!
The number of lights having crashed because of this: 0
According to Google, in the USA alone there's 25 million flights annually. So on all these millions of flights there will be some people forgetting to turn off their phones. And none of them have crashed because of a cell phone yet, since cell phones became popular 20 years ago. That's a LOT of data.
So you're talking about a statistical impossibility - airplane crashing from a cell phone is less likely than you walking down the road getting struck by lightning on a sunny day.
Meaning you are worrying about nothing, and the airline regulations that insist on this nonsense are pretty bad at statistics / math.
This is the "good 5G" - I am all for that. Not really better, or worse than the 4Gs and 3Gs that came before it.
The main issue is the mmWave 5G which happens to be at the exact one frequency around 60Ghz where the EMF starts interacting with oxygen. 50Ghz doesn't... 70Ghz doesn't... only the frequency they chose does interfere with oxygen, which combined with the beamforming properties simply means it's a DEW - a directed energy weapon.
Now I don't know why someone would like to install a world wide system of mini DEWs. Much could be speculated on it, and certain state actors would be very interested in that for sure - but likely it's an unknown reason right now, meaning I won't figure it out here from my laptop.
What I do know though is that it is de facto a DEW. Could be that they wanted to make super fast directed beam internet work to please customers to download a movie in 3 seconds and it just accidentally turned into a directed energy weapon. Possible! But if I can figure this out in 20 minutes reading the brochure and technical explanation of a 5 g cell, then I would say doing this by accident is highly unlikely.
If it's at 3-5Ghz and not beamforming - great, let's do it! No problem. If it's installing mini cells that track, trace, and target by design and God knows what or who can take over that network, then, I'd say hard pass on that.
The main issue is the mmWave 5G which happens to be at the exact one frequency around 60Ghz where the EMF starts interacting with oxygen. 50Ghz doesn't... 70Ghz doesn't... only the frequency they chose does interfere with oxygen, which combined with the beamforming properties simply means it's a DEW - a directed energy weapon.
Now I don't know why someone would like to install a world wide system of mini DEWs. Much could be speculated on it, and certain state actors would be very interested in that for sure - but likely it's an unknown reason right now, meaning I won't figure it out here from my laptop.
What I do know though is that it is de facto a DEW. Could be that they wanted to make super fast directed beam internet work to please customers to download a movie in 3 seconds and it just accidentally turned into a directed energy weapon. Possible! But if I can figure this out in 20 minutes reading the brochure and technical explanation of a 5 g cell, then I would say doing this by accident is highly unlikely.
If it's at 3-5Ghz and not beamforming - great, let's do it! No problem. If it's installing mini cells that track, trace, and target by design and God knows what or who can take over that network, then, I'd say hard pass on that.
Since you have to be with AT&T for 36 months to get your $800 trade-in deal, I assume you mean that you wanted to add your spouses Verizon line as a 2nd line on the phone (2nd SIM), keeping the primary line with AT&T?
I sent my iPhone 13 Pro Max back to AT&T because I decided 36 months was too long to get my trade-in money. Somehow, they have my trade-in equipment and I get paid for it a nickel at a time? No thanks. I don't agree with a lot of their policies, and now, they're dropping my free Spotify "premium" so I have to pay for that now. Not happy with AT&T right now.
As I understand it, one major difference is that the C-band signal coming from a satellite dish 22,000 Miles above the earth is extremely weak by the time it gets to your satellite dish, whereas C-band signals from a terrestrial tower would be far stronger.
You would think that, but on an instrument training flight with myself (250+ hour pilot) and a CFI (several thousand hours) following a victor airway the old fashioned way via VOR (I know, just use the GPS and fly direct) got a call from Boston Center that we were a couple of degrees off course. We checked everything and there were no setup mistakes. We realized that our cellphones were on when one of them rang. This was back in the 3G or maybe even 2G days, but we turned the phones off and magically we didn’t get any more helpful reminders from center. The phones were in our flight bags in the back seat, which was probably right over the VOR antennas. So phones can interfere (at least they could at one time). So for us poor GA folk who don’t have ultra-modern radio altimeters, we could have incorrect ILS readings and have an unpleasant surprise when we break out at minimums and see the runway is either not directly in front of us or worse, we are below glide path.