What do you think about this airline vs 5G brouhaha?

Mel Beckman mel at beckman.org
Fri Jan 21 20:12:08 UTC 2022


Geoff,

My understanding is that the FAA and 5G industry has just this week agreed on buffer zones around 50 of the impacted 80 US airports:

https://www.8newsnow.com/news/local-news/las-vegas-airport-included-in-5g-buffer-zone/

The 30 airports that are not buffered I think don’t have 5G deployed yet. For example, Denver international. The buffer zone is described as “the last 20 seconds of flight time”, which considering 230MPH (the airspeed limit in Class C airspace) as a worst case scenario, would be about a mile and a half.

I fly helicopters, and for helicopter EMS flying, radar altimeters are important on the RTB (return to base) leg. So unless the FAA can get buffer zones around all the hospital helipads, I think there’s still an issue. There wouldn’t be an issue flying to an accident site, because generally outbound EMS flights required to have much higher visibility minimums, so I don’t think that radar altimeter’s are used in that flight regime.

-mel via cell

On Jan 21, 2022, at 11:52 AM, nanon08 at mulligan.org wrote:

Jaun says just what I stated previously...  in Europe (and my understanding also in Japan) there is an agreement to create a PHYSICAL buffer zone (not just an RF spacing) between 5G transmitters and airport.

No such agreement has been made here in the US.  So both the RF spacing and physical spacing of 5G in the US is much closer and therefore it is disingenuous of ATT and Verizon to claim "well there are no problems in Europe"!

It is not possible to compare the 5G deployment in Europe to the US.

Thanks Mel for finding this video

Geoff


On 1/21/22 12:31, Mel Beckman wrote:
Here’s another video by 767 pilot Juan Brown from his chanel BlancoLirio:

https://youtu.be/aHIFs4EkA0k

He addresses many of the points being claimed by the FCC and 5G industry, in particular the reason you can’t compare US 5G with overseas 5G.

-mel via cell

On Jan 21, 2022, at 11:11 AM, Michael Thomas <mike at mtcc.com> wrote:


On 1/21/22 10:44 AM, Jay Hennigan wrote:

FAA puts all kinds of restrictions on what equipment is required to perform certain maneuvers. You need a localizer, glideslope, etc. for instrument landings. Radars are made today that can reject out-of-band interference. If FAA simply required a certified radar that filtered out-of-band signals during those weather conditions, the airlines would retrofit and private pilots would also either retrofit, not fly in those conditions, or divert to land in better weather.

It's not an FCC issue, and FAA needs to require equipment capable of safely operating within the allocated spectrum.


For commercial airlines is it just old equipment or all equipment that has this error? That is, is there actually an off the shelf radio that would solve the problem?

Mike


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