WHY Could 5G be DANGEROUS to Aircraft?!

hi everybody very welcome to mentor now as always i hope you're doing absolutely fantastic so the last few weeks there's been a lot of talks about how the rollout of 5g telecommunication technology in the united states might potentially have some negative impact on flight safety and what it's done is it actually forced some airlines to cancel flights or shift to different aircraft that is going to fly into the united states so what is this all about [Music] well in order to understand this we are going to have to go back a little bit more than one year in time back to december of 2020. because back then the federal communications commission the fcc in the united states decided that they were going to auction off a part of the radio frequency band between 3.7 and 3.98 gigahertz now this frequency band was supposed to be used for the new 5g technology previously had only been used by some telecommunications satellites out there and very sparsely used but the plan was now that it was going to form the backbone of this new 5g hyper fast mobile internet service the way that this was going to be implemented was that existing 4g base stations was going to be retrofitted into the 5g base stations as well and the old 4g stations they were kind of emitting their radio signals in all directions but the new 5g stations was going to become much more powerful and also they were going to start sending out their signals directly to the receivers so instead of just having a general network coverage if you took up a mobile device and you started you know watching or streaming a movie whatever the base station that was closest to you was going to direct beam directly towards you thereby becoming much more efficient using much less energy as a whole and becoming just extremely fast so this is the idea with 5g the problem is that the higher part of this frequency range of 3.98 gigahertz is also only about 202 megahertz away from the band that radio altimeters in aircraft uses which starts from 4.2 to 4.4 gigahertz so prior to this auction taking place the federal aviation administration the faa had asked the fcc to please hold the auction all right just stay off it for a while because we have to have a thorough look into whether or not these very close frequency ranges is going to have potential effects on the safety of aircraft this is the way that the faa works the problem though was that it looks like these two government entities were not really communicating on the same level because the fcc said we haven't seen any type of problems with these type of frequencies interfering with aircraft in any other part of the world we will assume that this is not going to be a problem but that's not the way that the faa works they will want to go through thorough testing of all their instrumentation before they allow something like this to happen but here we have two government entities with two very different targets and also two different areas of expertise working essentially against each other so what happened was that the fcc they went forward with the auction the two mobile data giants in the us at t and verizon started bidding against each other and they ended up splitting the access to these frequencies paying about 81 billion dollars for it that means that during this last year at t and verizon have been upgrading their base stations and that includes base stations that are situated very close to the approach path into major airports in the us so why is this a problem then well the radio altimeters that we use on our aircraft are little devices that effectively emit a radio signal down from the belly of our aircraft it then bounces off the ground up again to the receiver and judging the time just like a radar it calculates exactly how high we are our aircraft height over the ground generally when we're out flying at higher altitudes we use altimeters that utilizes differences in air pressure as we're climbing and descending but as we get closer to the ground especially when we're doing low visibility landings we need to know the exact height over the runway and that's when we utilize our radio altimeters these radio altimeters they are connected to different systems inside of the aircraft primarily to the outer pilot system and the outer throttle system so as we're coming in just as an example i did a cat 3 approach yesterday when it's foggy outside the aircraft will come in it will start counting down from about 2500 feet and then at a certain altitude the second autopilot will couple with the controls so up until that point is just one autopilot flying and then at a certain height the second autopilot will out the couple and then we'll continue down at about 400 feet above the ground this is measured from the radio altimeter the aircraft is going to start trimming back to get ready for potential go around and then as we get even lower we set our minimums as in when we as pilots need to decide whether or not we see enough to land or if we have to go around and that is also measured on radio heights at 50 feet radio that's normally where we have our minimum the aircrafts would be told by the radio altimeter among others to start initiating the flare as into pick the nose up and start getting rid of landing at 27 feet radio it will start to reduce the thrust back to idle and effectively land the aircraft so as you can hear the radio altimeter is an integral part of an outer land operation when these radioaltimeters were being constructed they were all alone in this part of the radio spectrum there was nothing close and certainly nothing that could potentially give interference to them this means that the masking in the radio receivers on the radial altimeters were quite wide so the masking is basically the area around the intended frequencies where other signals are being subdued so the issue is that when these new 5g base stations which are placed bang on the approach part to some of the airports in the united states are being switched on the higher frequency band which is only 202 megahertz away from the radial temperature band could potentially start sending interference to our radio altimeters and that means we could be coming in for a potential outer land and all of a sudden our radio altimeter starts showing crazy values either too low or too high and that could potentially as an example get the aircraft starting to flare at the wrong altitude or close the thrust levels because it thinks that in the landing phase because of these faulty signals some aircraft like the boeing 787 for example has the radial temperature even more integrated into the system it's used to lightly the radar altimeter to determine whether or not it's on the ground or in the air and of course if that aircraft would have some kind of interference with the radial altimeter it could potentially lead to the flight spoilers not coming up of the landing and them not being able to use their trust reverses during landing which could lead to a runway excursion these are all potentials right these are all worst case scenarios but in aviation we always have to assume that the worst case scenario could happen in fact back in 2009 a turkish airlines flight 1951 which i did a documentary about up here actually did crash partially because a faulty radio altimeter caused the outer throttle to go into idle at the wrong altitude so the faa is right in being very cautious here but what happened was that during the autumn of 2021 fea kept sending out these warnings saying that we are not ready for this we don't know how this is going to be affected they were working continuously with testing out certain radioaltimeters and see what would happen but this is something that takes a couple of years to properly evaluate but of course verizon and atnt had spent 81 billion on getting access to these radio frequencies so they finished their upgrading of their base stations and they said in december of 2021 we're going to flick the switch on that caused the faa to send out an air worthiness directive basically saying that if that happens we cannot guarantee that this airport which has these base stations around them which was several airports all over the united states including some of the biggest ones are safe to use autoland features on we are going to put out no thumbs which is notice to airmen saying that when it's switched on you're not allowed to use outer land this effectively means that if the weather goes bad if you have fog for example in this airport early in the morning late at night whenever it might happen a lot of aircraft is going to have to potentially diverge when the faa sent this out and the american government realized that they could potentially cause yet another travel crisis just because of this they managed to convince att and verizon to respond switching on these base stations for a couple of weeks and then they managed to convince them to extend it for another couple of weeks and during this time there's been intense negotiations about what to do about the problem and the way to solve it is twofold the first thing is for at t and verizon not to switch on the base stations that are very close to the approach part so within two miles away from the airport basically the other way to solve this problem is for the faa to start evaluating all of the different radio altimeters that are fitted to all the different aircraft types out there and say which ones are potentially affected by this interference and which ones aren't and this is why you were seeing that some airlines were shifting between maybe a boeing triple seven that wasn't tested yet to a boeing 747 that was tested to be able to come in and fly in and use category 2 and category 3 landings if needed this is likely going to happen over a period of time and hopefully at the end of that maybe verizon and at t will be able to switch on their base stations because i i understand that those people have paid billions of dollars to be able to use this and the problem with 5g as well is that because of the higher frequency it's very susceptible to things like rain for example or line of sight obstructions so they want to have as many base stations as possible in order to give this higher quicker better broadband service to everyone around but at the end here this is actually a very good example about how air safety is always paramount and how the faa will not allow any types of risk this is also by the way why you guys are not allowed to switch on your mobile phones during flight because we don't know what would happen if 300 people will switch on their mobile phones and start getting for example now a 5g signal which are directed up directly towards the aircraft it is much safer to keep everyone in flight mode until you're down on the ground and this is the way that the airline business deals with all of these things it's safety first and then we will check and only after we have proper data will we allow something we don't take any risks if we can avoid it so why is this problem not in other parts of the world then well it turns out that in for example europe it's a much bigger buffer between the upper part of the 5g network range to where the radio altimeters are it's over 600 megahertz so it's three times as big of a difference between the radio transmitters there which makes the risk of interference much much lower that's it guys so now check out this video up here about why you can't use a glass of water or a pendulum to orient yourself when you're out flying inside of cloud have an absolutely fantastic day consider becoming part of my patreon crew if you want to be part of our weekly zoom hangouts or get yourself some merch bye [Music]

Channel: Mentour Now!

Views: 191,578

Keywords: mentour pilot, 5g network, 5g, explained, video explainers, full episode, communication, satellite, twoer, frequency, bandwidth, cell tower, educational, education, mentor, pilot, aircraft, 737, beoing, airbus, flight path, altimeter, radio, radio altimeter, verizon, at&t, atandt, beam, flare, landing, category three

Id: xaP6SMK5Qmo

Length: 12min 31sec (751 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 27 2022