Paywalled unfortunately.
My opinion: stop pointing fingers for now. Fix the issue. Do a root cause analysis. Fix the root cause so it doesn’t happen again.
This has been going on for years, and someone or a lot of folks dropped the ball…
Search for the title, WSJ will often let you by the paywall through search engines.
I think it’s more the FAA reneged on their agreement to accept FCC decisions regarding these bandwidths, and the airlines suffering at the whims of the FAA’s waffling, and the wireless carriers not wanting to be blamed for a bunch of canceled flights beyond the airlines’ control that would be more rightfully blamed on the FAA than the wireless carriers. Either way, the airlines are screwed. It really is the FAA’s mess. The airlines and cell carriers are being taken for a ride.
WSJ article is pretty helpful:
We’re from the FAA and we’re here to blame you for our mistakes.
www.wsj.com
So the response to my request for facts is more unsupported opinion? Now we’ve gone from opinion to political hit pieces. Should I be surprised that a News Corp opinion piece starts with “It’s hard to know which is more messed up these days—air transportation, or the Biden Administration.” And then says “his Administration created the mess” that began in March 2020?
The only links from this opinion piece to confirmable facts are links to the AT&T and Boeing stock prices.
So, where do I find fault beyond the lack of factual support?
Blaming the current administration for decisions made nearly a year before it began.
Blaming the FAA for the problem, because the FCC approved a 258 page decision in March 2020. There’s a certain reliance here on the fact that the audience will conflate the FAA and FCC.
It wouldn’t be hard to link to that decision, but I suspect when I find it that it won’t fully support the WSJ’s opinion.
I don’t think the number of pages means anything in this context— the RTCA report linked above is 231 pages. If they’d just made it 30 pages longer, would it win the argument?
“At issue is the C-band spectrum that carriers plan to use to blanket metro areas with 5G. Carriers paid the U.S. government $80 billion for this valuable spectrum, but the Federal Aviation Administration now won’t let them use it.“. This is blatantly false and contradicted by the later statement that “the FAA said it had cleared only 45% of U.S. commercial airplanes to land in low-visibility conditions at only 48 of the 88 airports it deemed at highest risk from potential 5G interference”.
The FAA said carriers could use their spectrum. They said some aircraft at some airports couldn’t make low visibility approaches if their instruments were at risk.
It’s further contradicted by the AT&T quote they include: “At our sole discretion, we have voluntarily agreed to temporarily defer turning on a limited number of towers around certain airport runways.”
So, again, AT&T did this at their sole discretion, the FAA didn’t prevent them, and it affects a limited number of towers near certain runways at certain airports and doesn’t prevent them from blanketing metro areas with 5G.
So I return to my question— what evidence is there that the FAA did all-caps-nothing to address this massive change in signal environment? How would you expect that such a change could be implemented in the time available? I’m still looking for factual evidence, not political farce.
www.popularmechanics.com
