5G Airplane Interference Worries Were Largely Overhyped

Late last year, we noted how the FAA and the FCC (the agency that actually knows how spectrum works) had gotten into a bit of an ugly tussle over the FAA's claim that 5G could harm air travel safety.

The FAA claimed that deploying 5G in the 3.7 to 3.98 GHz C-Band" would cause interference with certain radio altimeters. But the FCC conducted its own study showing minimal issues, and pointed to the more than 40 countries have deployed 5G in this bandwidth with no evidence of harm. Lifelong wireless spectrum policy experts like Harold Feld also blogged about how this was a an overheated controversy, and any real harm could be mitigated.

It didn't much matter. It didn't take long before the news wires were filled with reports about how 5G was going to be a diabolical public safety menace when it came to air travel. In part, thanks to folks at the FAA, who leaked scary stories to outlets like the Wall Street Journal.

A year later, and a new NTIA study has found that yeah, most of the potential harm 5G can cause to altimeters can be mitigated with some software updates and careful strategizing of tower placement around airports, just as the FCC and numerous other countries had already stated years earlier:

Researchers found that 5G transmissions stay safely within their assigned frequencies and mostly don't point signals skyward where aircraft operate, according to the report released Tuesday, the first of several from the government on the new high-speed mobile phone service.

There is a low level of unwanted 5G emissions" in frequencies used by so-called radar altimeters - which calculate a plane's distance from the ground and are critical to landing in low visibility - the National Telecommunications and Information Administration said in the report.

The findings offer the the strongest indication to date that the patches being applied to some aircraft models should work well to protect them.

The fact that this always was a minor, fixable problem probably won't get anywhere near the coverage you saw last year when countless news outlets proclaimed that airliners could soon start falling from the sky thanks to 5G. This was also a weird instance where the FAA failed to cooperatively heed the insights of the FCC, the one regulator specifically tasked with understanding how wireless spectrum actually works.