By Sarosh Bana, Mumbai Correspondent.
The rollout of 5G wireless services in the United States has come forth as a veritable terror strike on the aviation industry, even as it was barely recovering from two years of the pandemic crisis.
US-bound air travel was in turmoil as carriers across Europe, Asia, and West Asia hastily cancelled hundreds of their flights to and from American airports on Wednesday, stranding thousands of air passengers around the globe over safety concerns caused by the 5G deployment.
As the aviation catastrophe eased somewhat the following day, with more flights being approved by the US’s Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the fallout was unequivocally denounced by at least one airline, namely, Dubai’s Emirates, the world’s largest international carrier and the operator of the largest Boeing-777 fleet.
Warning that the effects would be felt internationally for days, Emirates’ president Tim Clark reportedly told CNN that not many airlines had anticipated the upheavals as information on possible safety risks had “got through at a very, very late stage”. Terming the episode “one of the most delinquent, utterly irresponsible” in his career, he pointed out that over 32,000 Emirates passengers were and would be “completely inconvenienced as a result of flight cancellations”.
After two delays, US telecom giants AT&T and Verizon heeded appeals from the affected airlines and yet again delayed turning on new mobile phone towers in the vicinity of runways at some US airports.
Telecom companies and airlines have for long had disagreements over concerns that the powerful signals of 5G, which is the fifth generation of mobile network technology that uses high frequency electromagnetic waves, can interfere with crucial airplane instruments like the radio altimeter.
Invented in 1928 by Germany-born scientist Paul Kollsman, the barometric altimeter forever changed the way pilots would fly by enabling the accurate measurement of altitude by calculating barometric pressure and minimising prospects of head-on collisions. With a barometric setting display, popularly known as the Kollsman Window, his altimeter is still integral to aircraft flight almost a century later. Altimeter readings are at times fed directly into automated systems that can act without input from pilots.
Operating at frequencies of 4.2 to 4.4 GHz, radio altimeters measure the elevation of a plane by beaming an electromagnetic pulse and listening for the reflected signal. There is apprehension that the altimeter signals will be blinded by the new 5G networks, as US telecom providers have been sold the adjacent spectrum of 3.7 to 3.98 GHz, known as the C-band. The close proximity of these signals on the electrometric spectrum could interfere with the altimeters, causing them to malfunction and jeopardise the flight.
The largescale flight disruptions, however, raise some questions, one being why they at all needed to occur when all stakeholders were undoubtedly aware of all implications of the 5G-rollout.
Late last year, top executives of the Chicago-headquartered Boeing Company and the European consortium, Airbus Group SE, had warned that 5G technology could have “an enormous negative impact on the aviation industry”, and urged the US administration to delay the rollout.
In a joint letter to US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Boeing’s Dave Calhoun and Airbus Americas’ Jeffrey Knittel wrote, “5G interference could adversely affect the ability of aircraft to safely operate.” Maintaining that both the aircraft manufacturers had been consulting other aviation industry stakeholders in the US to understand 5G drawbacks concerning radio altimeters, they pointed out that an Aviation Safety Proposal to mitigate potential risks had been submitted to the US Department of Transportation for consideration.
On their part, the FAA and the aviation industry too had raised concerns on the issue, the former issuing airworthiness directives while warning that 5G interference could result in flight diversions.
In November, AT&T and Verizon delayed the commercial launch of their C-band wireless service for the first time and delayed again on 5 January for what they explained was to adopt precautionary measures to limit interference. The aviation industry, however, did not see these measures going far enough. Such misgivings hampered the new network from going live as scheduled on Wednesday.
The 5G technology has for long stirred controversy, not least because of the high-profile geopolitical tussle between Washington and Beijing over US sanctions against Huawei Technologies. The US action crippled China’s telecommunications giant, undermining its role in the global markets for smartphones as well as for fifth-generation wireless network infrastructure.
5G has been always acclaimed as a transformative technology, providing a virtual infrastructure that would change the way people live. It is meant to support faster mobile connections to enable smoother online streaming, quicker uploading of videos, and more devices to be connected swiftly to the internet.
In the US, apart from AT&T and Verizon, 5G is supplied by a pantheon on service providers like C Spire, Google Fi & Simple Mobile, Charter’s Spectrum Mobile, UScellular, US Mobile, Mint Mobile, Visible, T-Mobile/Sprint, Starry, Comcast/Xfinity, Nex-Tech Wireless, and Dish.
Verizon provides fixed and mobile 5G all over the US, and has reportedly been offering 5G broadband internet, called 5G Home, in 65 cities since 2018. It rolled out its 5G Ultra Wideband and Mobile 5G services in 2019, and its 5G Nationwide covers well over 2,000 cities. AT&T claimed nationwide 5G status in 2020, offering the technology in two forms. One is called 5G+ and operates on the mmWave spectrum. It is available in over 35 cities. The other is the low-band 5G network operating in 14,000 cities and towns.
