Canada eyeing 5G’s impact on ‘critical’ aircraft tech amid U.S. warnings
Global News
The U.S. airline heads say the current rules run the risk of allowing 5G interference on the frequencies used by pilots and aircrafts to gauge their distance from the ground.
Canadian officials and airline leaders are weighing the potential impacts of 5G technology on “critical” aircraft technology amid warnings from American air industry heads that deploying the technology under current rules could cause a “catastrophic” aviation crisis.
AT&T on Tuesday paused plans to turn on a limited number of 5G towers located near certain U.S. airport runways. That followed warnings from the CEOs of major U.S. airlines that the technology could interfere with vital aviation systems and create “chaos” for flights landing at the affected airports.
A Canadian government official told Global News work is currently underway to better understand the potential impacts of 5G on “crucial” aviation technology: specifically, the radio altimeters.
The U.S. airline industry lobby group Airlines 4 America describes radio altimeters as “crucial aircraft avionics that measure the distance between an aircraft and the ground.”
At issue, the lobby group says, is the fear that current U.S. rules allow telecommunications companies to operate their 5G networks at a range on the radiofrequency spectrum that lets them butt up against the range used by aircraft radio altimeters.
Effectively, the U.S. airline heads say the current rules run the risk of allowing interference on the frequencies used by pilots and aircraft systems to gauge their distance from the ground.
“Multiple modern safety systems on aircraft will be deemed unusable causing a much larger problem than what we knew,” the airline leaders said in a letter to U.S. federal officials reported on by Reuters.
“Airplane manufacturers have informed us that there are huge swaths of the operating fleet that may need to be indefinitely grounded.”