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Sorry to rant, but... I drives me nuts when people use "could" in this context. 5G has been in development for over a decade I think. It's been deployed in th

Sorry to rant, but... I drives me nuts when people use "could" in this context. 5G has been in development for over a decade I think. It's been deployed in the real world since 2019. So what the fuck have the FAA and FCC been doing in that time? You would have thought someone would have actually determined whether 5G can interfere with one of the most popular commercial aircraft? Really? No one checked? No one asked? This has been a mainstream news story for 4 weeks. And no one at the FAA or FCC has put a 5G antenna next to an 737 and even tried check? No one has put together pilots logs or looked at aircraft systems logs? And in that time presumably 100s of 737s have taken off and landed and flown over these? At this point, we know 2 things: It's very unlikely this an issue or we'd have seen a lot of serious incidents probably including an actual crash AND we need a federal organisation that manages aircraft safety and another for communications including EM spectrum to avoid inference and we don't actually seem to have either. I work with trading tech. Nothing complex or amazing. Just money, nothing safety critical. Sometimes things break or we have bugs. I can say a lot of things to my boss when something goes wrong, I can't say "It could be a massive problem, but I haven't bothered checking despite having 4 weeks to at least start" so I don't really know.

sgc 5y ago
I see their statements as indicating that they do know in fact there are failure modes that will occur some of the time. When you use could in this context, it's to indicate that it won't happen in all circumstances, not that you don't know if it can happen at all.
- LatteLazy 5y ago
  That's what gets me: they don't seem to know. Or at least they don't want to say? If they know there is an (intermittent, occasional) issue then ground the planes. Don't announce it, but cryptically and then do nothing and wait for a few 100 deaths. If they know there isn't a problem then shut up. And if they don't know, why the fuck don't they know after (at least) 4 weeks of testing. Can't they at least say all tests fine or 99% of tests fine or we crashed 4 planes but maybe the test pilots were just bad?
mcguire 5y ago
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30445969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30445969 "They mostly did. They've been warning about this for 3+ years now (see this report from the FCC back in September and October 2019) https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/102214765103/AVSI%20RA%20Interi https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/102214765103/AVSI%20RA%20Interi... "They couldn't have warned folks about more than a year or so sooner than that, because the spectrum bands for 5G hadn't even been fully decided prior to it. (The public notice of band reconfiguration only got announced back in May 2019)"
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
p_l 5y ago
It's not that easy to exhaustively test that the many different 5G systems won't accidentally corrupt radio altimeter signals. It's been in the works for a long time, and aviation and telecom groups have cooperated on this worldwide. It's why everywhere else, there are either mitigations on 3.8-4.0GHz frequency use near airports, or the spectrum is not allocated to 5G comms. Then, quite recently in the whole development, FCC decided to allocate 3.8-3.98GHz to telcos, without mitigations near airports

sgc 5y ago

I see their statements as indicating that they do know in fact there are failure modes that will occur some of the time. When you use could in this context, it's to indicate that it won't happen in all circumstances, not that you don't know if it can happen at all.

LatteLazy 5y ago
That's what gets me: they don't seem to know. Or at least they don't want to say? If they know there is an (intermittent, occasional) issue then ground the planes. Don't announce it, but cryptically and then do nothing and wait for a few 100 deaths. If they know there isn't a problem then shut up. And if they don't know, why the fuck don't they know after (at least) 4 weeks of testing. Can't they at least say all tests fine or 99% of tests fine or we crashed 4 planes but maybe the test pilots were just bad?

mcguire 5y ago

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30445969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30445969 "They mostly did. They've been warning about this for 3+ years now (see this report from the FCC back in September and October 2019) https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/102214765103/AVSI%20RA%20Interi https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/102214765103/AVSI%20RA%20Interi... "They couldn't have warned folks about more than a year or so sooner than that, because the spectrum bands for 5G hadn't even been fully decided prior to it. (The public notice of band reconfiguration only got announced back in May 2019)"

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

p_l 5y ago

It's not that easy to exhaustively test that the many different 5G systems won't accidentally corrupt radio altimeter signals. It's been in the works for a long time, and aviation and telecom groups have cooperated on this worldwide. It's why everywhere else, there are either mitigations on 3.8-4.0GHz frequency use near airports, or the spectrum is not allocated to 5G comms. Then, quite recently in the whole development, FCC decided to allocate 3.8-3.98GHz to telcos, without mitigations near airports