Name: What is 5G, and is it Safe to Use on Planes?
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5G is a leap forward in wireless technology, providing data speeds up to 100 times faster than 4G. So why is this seemingly revolutionary tech raising concern in the aviation industry?

The 5G signal works in a fundamentally different way from 4G.

5G is a leap forward in wireless technology, providing data speeds up to 100 times faster than 4G. So why is this seemingly revolutionary tech raising concern in the aviation industry?

What is 5G, and is it Safe to Use on Planes?

The 5G signal works in a fundamentally different way from 4G.

Tech & Engineering

What is 5G, and is it Safe to Use on Planes?Published: March 4, 2022Narrator: Do 5G signals affect airplanes?The new technology is expected to bring transformatively faster data speeds—up to 100 times faster than 4G—but the new technology is drawing concern from the aviation industry prompting policy makers to twice delay the rollout and even leading to flight cancellations so, what is 5G? And what does it have to do with airplanes?Harish Krishnaswamy: 5G is the next generation of cellular technology to follow 4G. Each generation typically represents a leap forward in the wireless connections that we can achieve to our cell phones, to our tablets, to our laptops, etcetera and that usually means a transformation in what wireless does for our daily lives.Narrator: So radios, TV’s, wifi, all send data using radio waves and 5G comes in three flavors: low band, which provides lots of coverage, at similar data download speeds to 4G, mid-band, which is kind of the middle of pack best of both for coverage and speed and high-band or millimeter wave, the fastest but, loses signal strength over relatively short distances and is easily blocked by buildings, humans, even leaves.Krishnaswamy: While higher data rates at higher frequencies are excellent, almost everything else about high frequencies are a challenge.Narrator: Because 5G waves don’t travel as far, they need more base stations, or hubs, to support them and that’s part of the reason that for now, 5G signals exists mostly in urban areas.Monish Ghosh: The signal decays very fast. And so if you moved out of the range of the station, then there will be another base station that you can connect to so you don't lose your connection.Narrator: But maybe the most contentious issue around the rollout has to do with a piece of safety equipment airplanes use called radio altimeters, a device used to measure distances.Ghosh: These altimeters are very useful for aircraft as they come into land or as they're taking off and in bad weather, because some of the other devices that are used to measure altitude don't work very well in those conditions.Narrator: Radio altimeters use radio waves to measure the distance the plane is from the ground and from other objects.Ghosh: So they basically send a signal which reflects back up from the ground and goes back to the receiver, they get a very accurate estimate of height above ground.Narrator: That information feeds a lot of automated systems planes use, especially for landing and in bad weather—and experts are concerned that interference even for a few seconds could cause problems.Peter Lemme: It could be pretty serious. And that's why everybody is very concerned about this. Again, the radio does a lot of different things. Out of an abundance of caution, we have to presume it's going to happen, even though it might be a very low probability. You know what accident is one too many is really the way it comes out And people’s lives could be at stake.Narrator: Think of a radio receiver in a car. It’s designed to tune in to just one station at a time. If it allows other stations to bleed through, it gets hard to hear anything clearly.In the case of radio altimeters, interference could cause an altimeter not to function at all or cause it to give inaccurate readings.Lemme: And the standards for radio altimeters were really set by 1980, we haven't really changed that much in the last 40 years.Ghosh: So that is where the concern is that there are a lot of radar altimeters that are old, that do not have the latest technology in terms of filtering, and they could potentially face interference. There's a potential of interference. I don't think anybody has demonstrated to date that interference will occur.Narrator: Another thing at play is that the 5G signal works in a fundamentally different way from 4G—that is, it sends signals out in beams targeted towards individuals.Ghosh: So some of the analysis that I've seen on this problem has assumed that all of the beam energy from 5G base station will go in the direction of the aircraft and it could be a potential interference. The truth is that that is very, very, very, very, very unlikely that that will happen because the power will be distributed among all the users it's servicing, most of whom are on the ground.Narrator: So to protect against interference, telecom companies have agreed to delay turning on 5G towers near some airports.Lemme: There isn't there isn't an easy solution for the hardware on the airplanes. It has to be sort of redone to have these filters in place. And that's that's what we're worried about taking what could take two, three or four year.Narrator: And now the FAA estimates about 90 percent of commercial airplanes have altimeters that are approved for landing in airports where 5G is deployed.Lemme: That's a good sign but the fact that they have not released the last 10 percent is very troubling because it would suggest some airplanes are going to be, have a problem.Narrator: We need more data to know exactly how the new 5G signal might interact with radio altimeters in the usGhosh: There is a severe lack of actual measurements of interference happening on the ground So in some sense, in order to be able to really address this, you have to be able to start deploying in a measured way so that you can start taking measurements as to what is the potential scale for interference.So there is a process that needs to happen to really understand what the potential for interference is.

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What is 5G, and is it Safe to Use on Planes?

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