[HN Gopher] 5G's Rollout Rattled Hundreds of Pilots
___________________________________________________________________
5G's Rollout Rattled Hundreds of Pilots
Author : samizdis
Score : 93 points
Date : 2022-10-14 10:13 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| msh wrote:
| I find the airplane operators/pilot overentiteled. Why shut down
| 5G as some of them suggest if its the altimeters on the planes
| that are actually defective/not within spec.
| twawaaay wrote:
| Ignoring reality isn't helpful.
|
| If we go this way we would have to defund highway patrols
| because it is waste of time (traffic rules already specify how
| to drive safely). You don't need IRS (because law says how to
| pay taxes).
|
| Also try to understand those pilots did not manufacture the
| equipment they are flying. They bought equipment that was
| certified to be airworthy or are flying for somebody who owns
| the equipment that was certified to be airworthy.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| stefan_ wrote:
| We are in this situation because the FAA is ignoring reality
| for some 50 years now. They think just doing nothing means
| nothing bad can ever happen; well, reality just caught up
| with them.
| Huh1337 wrote:
| So the solution here is to go after the planes/AOC holders
| that have misbehaving receivers and to force them to upgrade
| to correctly working hardware, just like we do with cars.
| Even if your car is certified, it will still get pulled off
| the street if it misbehaves - see Dieselgate. And company
| drivers also don't buy the cars they drive - nobody cares.
| xani_ wrote:
| The airplane pilots can't do shit about it, it's up to their
| parent company to pressure company (and pay $$$) that sold them
| planes to fix it.
|
| From their perspective it worked for decades and now someone
| decide to jam it.
|
| From engineering perspective, yes, they are defective and don't
| have enough filtering on the input to stay within its band
| p_l wrote:
| From engineering perspective, the 5G equipment is not staying
| in its band, not radar altimeters. Remember that the regs for
| band usage are on _transmit_ , not receive, and the physical
| reality makes radio altimeters especially hard to filter.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| I don't think you understand FCC rules about communications
| at all. You can't just freely snoop on someone's cell phone
| call because you are just receiving. There are all kinds of
| regulations around reception.
| readams wrote:
| No the altimeters are sensitive to frequencies outside
| their band. So 5g transmitting inside its band causes the
| altimeter to malfunction.
| teeray wrote:
| Many receivers can be affected by strong signals outside
| of their band. The strange analog world has effects like
| desensitization and intermodulation, which can produce
| in-band signals or attenuate the ones you intended to
| hear. The degree to which a receiver is immune to these
| effects is part of the engineering of the receiver. They
| likely didn't consider strong C-band transmissions with a
| high duty cycle in their design at the time.
| selimnairb wrote:
| I want the pilots who have my life and the lives of my friends
| and loves ones in their hands to be entitled to whatever they
| need to safely do their jobs.
| msh wrote:
| Well their companies bought defective equipment, and now
| wants someone else to pay but not using a resource that the
| airplane companies are using for free.
|
| I see 3 solutions: 1: shut down 5G. 2: Ground airplanes with
| defective equipment 3: Make the airplane companies pay for
| the spectrum that their defective equipment needs to operate.
|
| Option 2 would satisfy flying safely and not put
| externalities on companies that had no fault in this. 3 also
| would but would not be very efficient.
| mellavora wrote:
| > Well their companies bought defective equipment
|
| No they didn't. The equipment worked just fine until people
| started broadcasting on a nearby frequency.
|
| Like if I put a jammer outside your living room window and
| your WiFi stopped working, would that be because you bought
| 'defective equipment'? After all, your router doesn't have
| the latest 'anti-jamming' error correcting codes built in.
| msh wrote:
| Unless I misunderstand the altimeters did not live up to
| the required specifications when they were produced, but
| as the nearby spectrum was not in use nobody really cared
| about this.
| darksaints wrote:
| It wasn't the equipment working fine that made it
| defective. It was the fact that they were using
| frequencies hundreds of MHz away from what they were
| allowed to use.
| blantonl wrote:
| The equipment is indeed defective. If your receiver is
| able to be overloaded by adjacent channel interference
| because you as the designed neglected to install a
| bandpass filter on such a critical piece of equipment,
| and it wasn't discovered until later when someone legally
| was granted a license to use adjacent spectrum, your
| equipment is WILDLY defective. Just because it took many
| many years to identify the failure doesn't give the
| manufacturers a pass.
|
| A jammer is a malicious, unlicensed product specifically
| designed to prevent your Wifi from working.
| ominous_prime wrote:
| The planes were in spec at their time of production, and in
| working condition before the 5g rollout. Imagine carriers
| installing some new technology near highways which causes cars
| with a device installed before 1999 to occasionally crash. You
| can't just say "too bad, those owners should have upgraded by
| now".
|
| Regardless of what the specifications say, you can't rollout
| new technology without taking the real world parameters into
| account, and these were well-known parameters before anything
| rolled out.
| mihaaly wrote:
| Probably because less harm is done if you have lower speed for
| browsing than when a plane crashes or the air traffic is
| decimated. But I am just guessing.
| upofadown wrote:
| >if its the altimeters on the planes that are actually
| defective/not within spec.
|
| Is there any evidence this is the case? This sort of thing is a
| lot like property zoning. If a steel mill starts up next door
| to your residential property in what used to be a park then
| there is nothing stopping you from adding more sound proofing
| to your walls to make it so you can sleep. But should you have
| to do this and can you do this at all? In this case the
| neighbouring band was originally used for satellite downlinks.
| So barely detectable signals with large dishes required. Radar
| altimeters in aircraft actually used to cause interference to
| the satellite downlinks when the aircraft flew over.
|
| The fact is that you need to have sufficient physical
| separation between services in adjacent bands. In this case,
| you can't expect things to work if an aircraft flies directly
| over a 4 GHz 5G transmitter at a low altitude. This aspect of
| adjacent band interference is an important part of spectrum
| management. You can't just wave the issue away...
| crote wrote:
| Altimeters are allowed to use the 4.2GHz - 4.4GHz band. They
| are getting interference from signals at 3.98GHz and below.
| This means they need over _twice_ the spectrum that was
| allocated to them.
|
| It's more like the family who is first to move into a
| neighborhood under construction, complaining that their kids
| can no longer play in the empty lots because houses are being
| built there. And it's not even the empty lot next to them,
| but one lot over.
| upofadown wrote:
| Filters are not magic. They have tradeoffs. If you make a
| filter with a really sharp cutoff you end up with a really
| large filter with a lot of loss. So then you have trouble
| receiving really weak signals, say, reflections from the
| ground. One way you might overcome this is to really ramp
| up the transmitted power but that can cause radar receiver
| problems and can cause interference with services in
| adjacent bands, say, 5G.
|
| This sort of thing is why allocating TV frequencies is and
| was complicated. That is because someone might live right
| next door to a TV transmitter and they might be trying to
| watch a weak signal on an adjacent channel. You usually
| have to allocate some dead channels for the area to prevent
| receivers from being overloaded. So in that case would it
| be fair to say that receiver was using channels it had no
| right to when set to the weaker signal? After all, the
| transmitter was there before the receiver was...
|
| Note that other countries have managed to deal with this
| routine and common issue with respect to the introduction
| of 4 GHz 5G. There is something weird going on in the
| USA...
| chmorgan wrote:
| This! The altimeters with issues are not operating to their
| design specs. No one noticed until 5g apparently but imo
| it's on the altimeters, and not 5g, if they aren't properly
| rejecting out of band noise/energy.
| upofadown wrote:
| >The altimeters with issues are not operating to their
| design specs.
|
| Then what is the required passband attenuation at 220 MHz
| away from the centre frequency as per the spec? What
| altimeters are not meeting this spec?
|
| I find it weird that people are claiming that the
| altimeters are defective here. That would be a big deal
| if true.
| ominous_prime wrote:
| Unfortunately these altimeters are part of a very large
| critical infrastructure, which can't be ignored. Just
| saying they shouldn't be working that way doesn't negate
| the fact that they are working that way. Part of
| engineering is taking the real world into account, even
| if the real world is inconvenient for you.
| stevenhubertron wrote:
| So your suggestion is we ground all flights for 6-12
| months while they retrofit new altimeters so you can have
| your phone battery die faster?
| uncomputation wrote:
| Yes, that's exactly what OP proposed. /s
| awinder wrote:
| If I inject a new feature into production and it destabilizes
| existing functionality, it's the new features fault (and it
| gets rolled back). It doesn't matter if I really think it's the
| fault of the other component, or I would have designed it
| differently (especially now that I know the consequences!).
| Maybe we end up "fixing" the existing functionality and then
| proceeding with the new feature -- but not until stable state
| is re-established.
|
| This is like standard practice for shit that is of trivial
| importance to humanity in a newish engineering field. So I
| don't for the life of me understand the logic of being more
| flippant when it comes to human lives in a more established
| engineering field.
| can16358p wrote:
| So regardless of 5G C Band is indeed the cause or not, why aren't
| they testing it in a controlled environment? Make some test
| flights in good viewing conditions near those locations with the
| reports, and have turned on, data downloading/uploading 5G cell
| phones onboard using different planes/series and see if there's
| any interference happening.
|
| I know it's more complicated and costlier than that but since
| lives might potentially be in danger and since it's too late to
| change the 5G bands, it seems to be the only viable option.
|
| If it it indeed causes, C band can simply be banned near runways
| and say, be allowed inside the airport in low power settings if
| it doesn't cause interference with outside planes.
| karteum wrote:
| The issue has been known and adressed in France for a while
| (and to my knowledge, France has been pioneer in handling the
| topic seriously. e.g. see https://www.anfr.fr/liste-
| actualites/actualite/la-protection... ).
|
| 5G base stations have compliant out-of-band emissions so the
| issue is not "because of 5G" but rather "because radio-
| altimeters gather energy from adjacent bands" (something we
| call "blocking"). Not all radio-altimeters are the same, but
| for some of them there is very little filtering and the only
| thing that protected them from good old 4G was that the antenna
| behaves somewhat as a filter and 2.6 GHz was far enough from
| 4.2 GHz... It may sound silly for a safety-critical equipment,
| but we really have to think about the really long lifetime of
| those equipments and think with the context of the time when
| they were designed/deployed (e.g. if there is only space-to-
| earth transmission in adjacent bands, why would they put
| filters that would add insertion loss and cost ? In the 80's
| there was no 4G/5G in sight...). Probably the aeronautical
| authorities also failed to inform the relevant issue in due
| time within the spectrum regulation process, so this has not
| been known or studied properly at ITU/CEPT/etc in the context
| of those frequency bands close to 4.2 GHz. It also seems that
| the radio-altimeters vendors keep a lot of secrecy on the
| technical details of their equipments (a part of the internal
| culture which also comes from the dual civil/military use of
| those systems) so even people who represent civil aviation
| authorities or aircraft manufacturers such as boeing/airbus in
| spectrum regulation authorities do not always have full access
| to the relevant information.
|
| Now the situation is what it is, and the short-term solution is
| to have some kind of 5G exclusion zones around airports, and of
| course operators are not happy with this because they paid huge
| prices for 5G licences and now they discover that they have
| new/additional constraints around airports... Long-term
| solution is also an issue, because it is not that simple to put
| filters on existing equipments (if they change the behavior,
| the whole computer need to be re-calibrated, and pilots
| trained, and the whole thing re-certified, which is also not as
| simple of doing it once and certifying all aircrafts from the
| same model but really must be done one-by-one in a custom way
| for every aircraft). I understood that new specs for radio-
| altimeters will soon be out so we can hope that the situation
| improves soon as the retrofit will be able to start (even
| though it will take years), but there is a possibility that
| even new radio-altimeters may still continue to be vulnerable
| to blocking in 4-4.2 GHz in order to maintain their required
| accuracy (I'm no expert in radars but I trust those people who
| told me). So the issue will be solved with regards to 5G in
| 3.4-3.8 GHz as deployed in Europe, but maybe not above 4 GHz
| (which is one reason why it may be better to restrict to low-
| power/verticals in the future uses in those bands).
|
| Anyway, this is a complex topic as you see...
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| > anonymously share safety incidents and concerns
|
| Why? It is not like there is serious privacy violation in telling
| that altimeter broke, and this makes the data much less reliable.
| Not saying the data is fake for sure, but I have came across
| enough haters of 5g, and I am pretty sure someone could post fake
| entries just to scare people.
| jwn wrote:
| ASRS (https://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/) is how both private and
| commercial (including ATP) pilots can anonymously and non-
| punitively share safety or otherwise concerning events.
|
| The goal is data collection to assess and prevent incidents.
| NASA's intake on the reports are _not_ anonymous, but their
| public reports are. NASA functions as the filter between pilots
| and the FAA /NTSB.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| Because the airline industry isn't too keen on pilots reporting
| safety issues. Fear of retaliation would stifle reporting if
| anonymity could not be ensured. This has nothing to do with 5G.
| crote wrote:
| The airline industry is _very_ keen on pilots reporting
| safety incidents. Over the years it has moved more and more
| towards being a no-blame environment: as long as an incident
| is immediately reported and wasn 't due to gross negligence,
| you will not be punished.
|
| If pilots are not afraid to report incidents, they will
| report them more often. This in turn means that hidden issues
| are more easily discovered, which in turn could save lives.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| Worth noting that, just like the meteorological disruption, this
| is a US-only problem. It's not a problem with 5G in general,
| other countries assigned safe bands instead.
| jeromegv wrote:
| Canada had to create buffer zone so that 5G towers are not
| anywhere near airports.
| crote wrote:
| In The Netherlands 5g rollout is being delayed over and over
| again due to a single satellite communication station, used for
| NATO signal interception and a ship-to-shore communication
| downlink.
| permo-w wrote:
| one thing I've noticed since 5g has been introduced in the UK is
| that 4g has gotten significantly slower and less prevalent. has
| anyone else noticed this?
| blue_cookeh wrote:
| Not at all - in fact what I _have_ noticed is that 4G seems to
| be far more reliable than 5G (on a Galaxy Fold 3 here) even in
| strong signal areas.
| dfox wrote:
| Many phones (certainly iPhone 12 behaves this way) will show 4G
| LTE link as being "5G" when they are connected to eNodeB that
| is capable of 5G in NSA mode regardles of whether the link
| actually uses any 5G NR bearer channels or whether it is
| actually physically possible (interference, path loss, gNodeB
| antenna configuration...) to use NR channels.
|
| Thus you can pretty well observe a lot of what really is 4G as
| 5G.
| Zigurd wrote:
| In the US, carriers are allowed to brand an enhanced LTE
| service as "5Ge." That may account for there being fewer times
| when your phone shows "LTE" or "4G" as the connection type.
| _djo_ wrote:
| That's not unexpected after a while, as the telco switches
| prioritisation and bandwidth from 4G cells to 5G cells, as
| happened with 3G to 4G. But it's too early for it to be
| happening at a noticeable level and might mean your provider
| has underinvested in capacity.
|
| Just a guess though.
| musha68k wrote:
| I'm not sure why so many things have gotten both fantastically
| more advanced and much worse at the same time. Reminds me of the
| "premium mediocre" conundrum a bit.
|
| In this case we can see it's not the usual suspect
| (over/efficiency mindset) but maybe there is something much
| uglier lurking underneath? Affecting both companies and
| government bodies even - which should feel less "budget" pressure
| to be overly efficient in everything?
|
| I don't know what factors those are. Though they could still be
| that plus something else (more transparently cultural)?
| britch wrote:
| I don't think it's more complicated than money in either case.
|
| Businesses are increasing consolidated and have market pressure
| to show not just profits but increasing profits year over year.
|
| Government agencies are affected by a combination of regulatory
| capture and a half century of austerity
| pessimizer wrote:
| > I don't think it's more complicated than money in either
| case.
|
| The trick is to make it look more complicated than that, so
| no one follows the money. If somebody does, call them names.
| If calling them a Luddite conspiracy theorist doesn't work
| because you used to employ them as an expert and they have a
| long track record, just say that they're _bolstering_ or
| _emboldening_ or _platforming_ Luddite conspiracy theorists
| (who might also be racist-adjacent China-deniers.)
|
| You buy a media in order to use it.
| tomohawk wrote:
| > "I'd sleep like a baby [on a plane] that flew over a 5G base
| station at full power output," he told Spectrum. "Probably
| something happens that's unusual and the pilots attribute it to
| 5G but maybe it's not attributable to 5G. After everything in the
| news, they're now submitting what they actually see, whereas
| before they perhaps weren't motivated to do that."
|
| This is just pure speculation.
| [deleted]
| Katie69 wrote:
| callesgg wrote:
| My main takeaway from the article is that it is scary that
| aircraft safety is so dependent on a signal that is so easily
| generated and spoofed.
|
| From the article it sounds like anyone can go to an airport and
| simply send some garbage signals towards an approaching aircraft
| to make it deploy air breaks and crash if the pilot is not quick
| to react.
|
| When I think about it it seams like a common thing in aviation
| tech. ads-b has similar issues, it is completely
| unauthenticicated/unsigned there is 100% trust.
|
| Anyone can pretend to be anyone else.
| blantonl wrote:
| It is important to note that 5G and aircraft radar altimeters do
| NOT operate or coexist on the same frequencies. The problem is
| that 5G frequencies are _close_ to radar altimeter c-band
| frequencies and the issue lies with certain aircraft that do not
| have sufficient band pass filters in place on their radar
| altimeter receivers, so when a strong 5G signal is present the
| aircraft 's radar altimeter can be overloaded with adjacent
| channel interference.
|
| Retrofitting band pass filters on existing aircraft radar
| altimeters isn't a trivial task - avionics changes to aircraft
| are a multi-year project since extensive testing is done on
| anything electrical installed on an aicraft.
|
| Additionally, some 5G infrastructure equipment may need
| additional band pass filters installed to prevent spurious
| transmissions outside of their assigned frequency ranges in areas
| near airports.
|
| If you aren't familiar with a bandpass filter, it basically
| filters all RF outside of a certain frequency range. Sensitive
| receivers can naturally be overwhelmed by RF outside of the
| receiver's frequency range, and preventing that RF getting to the
| receiver in the first place is the role of a band pass filter.
| underscores__ wrote:
| We can now blame our shit approaches on 5G. It's a win win
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| Could this also be why my dad's satellite TV reception with a
| C-Band LNB has been degrading over time (as his area slowly gets
| 5G coverage)?
| blue_cookeh wrote:
| LNBs can degrade over time - he may just need to replace it.
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| hmm... I actually didn't think of that, ok will check.
| upofadown wrote:
| Yes, very definitely. The new 4 GHz 5G transmitters are now
| adjacent to the existing downlink band and are causing
| interference to those users as well. Your dad might have to get
| an LNB with specific filtering or a separate filter and that
| might not work if the transmitter is close enough. Hobby dish
| owners have no protection here. They can't exclude 5G
| transmitters from their vicinity like a commercial dish
| operator.
|
| Relevant discussion:
|
| * https://www.intelsat.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2021/02/intelsat...
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| Damn, ok thanks for the info!
| _s wrote:
| I think there is some context missing from this;
|
| The 5G band that was auctioned off is only one step next to the
| band used by radar altimeters - essentially a piece of equipment
| on aircraft that gives it its precise height above the ground.
|
| Aircraft can and do have barometric (pressure corrected) and GPS
| altimeters as well (which are usually giving you your height
| above sea level - and knowing the height of the terrain you can
| work out your height above ground), all of which feed into the
| various systems allowing them to have an accurate height at any
| given point during the flight.
|
| This is most needed when flying "precision 3D approaches",
| usually in bad weather when visual contact with the ground may
| not be possible until the wheels actually touch the ground.
| Autopilot systems that land the aircraft fly these "approaches",
| and thus rely greatly on their height, speed and distance.
|
| These radar altimeters were mostly designed and certified back in
| the 80's (or even earlier!) - and it's a lot of work to have any
| equipment certified - especially today. Hardware + software back
| then was nowhere near as good as it is today, yet many of these
| altimeters still being produced today would be to the original
| spec from a few decades ago - which had a much wider tolerance or
| sensitivity to the frequencies, so when you have a frequency only
| a few steps away - a slightly older / worn equipment with perhaps
| not the best shielding will definitely pick up some surges from
| frequencies next to it.
|
| Blame the FAA for their archaic and slow, near impossible process
| to get equipment certified. Blame the Aircraft / Equipment
| manufacturers for not updating their equipment with the times,
| but that's on the FAA for making this process difficult- see 737
| certification as an example, leading to the max accidents.
|
| See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/5G#Aviation
| Someone1234 wrote:
| > FAA for making this process difficult- see 737 certification
| as an example, leading to the max accidents.
|
| The certification process being "difficult" isn't why the 737
| Max was unsafe. The FAA allowed Boeing to self-certify its
| safety, and voices inside the company were ignored or silence.
| They literally created a system to save a buck for their
| clients then outsourced development of that system to save
| another buck, then rubber-stamped it themselves.
|
| Blaming this on too much or too difficult regulation is
| farcical.
|
| PS - I also find the entire thrust of this argument
| contradictory: "Equipment built in the 80s wasn't high enough
| quality for the new 5G operating environment, so we need to
| weaken 'difficult' regulation today to make producing lower
| quality equipment cheaper, tomorrow be damned."
| [deleted]
| bsder wrote:
| > PS - I also find the entire thrust of this argument
| contradictory: "Equipment built in the 80s wasn't high enough
| quality for the new 5G operating environment, so we need to
| weaken 'difficult' regulation today to make producing lower
| quality equipment cheaper, tomorrow be damned."
|
| No, the problem is that the altimeters _didn 't meet spec_.
|
| These altimeters are _NOT_ supposed to be susceptible to
| these frequencies. However, people cut corners decades ago
| and now it 's being found out.
|
| The FAA should have told the airlines "You have N years to
| get these replaced. Start now." But they didn't--because
| they're in the pocket of the big aerospace companies.
|
| Well, so the FCC rolled it out. Now the FAA and the aerospace
| companies _have_ to deal with it.
| eru wrote:
| Regulation has more than one dimension.
|
| We are not limited to talking about 'weakening' or
| 'strengthening' regulations. We can talk about making saner
| rules, too.
| _s wrote:
| Going through the process to type certify the Max as anything
| other than a 737 would've been far more expensive, slow and
| painful for Boeing and all its customers because of how slow
| and difficult the FAA is.
|
| They added the MCAS because they didn't want the Max to be a
| different type, which meant starting the certification
| process from scratch. They were able to self certify
| precisely because it was a 737 type.
|
| Yes - there were many issues that lead to the accidents and
| you can't really point to just the one thing; but ultimately
| it did boil down to a culture at the company created by the
| environment it operates under.
|
| I'm not defending Boeing here - if anything, I'm more upset
| at them as they had the engineering will and talent, the
| political and financial backing to make meaningful changes to
| the regulatory environment and make aviation safer as a
| manufacturer - but they chose greed.
|
| Lastly, that's nowhere near what I said but I can see how you
| can get to that conclusion. I'm an aviation enthusiast and a
| Pilot (feel free to go through my post history) - and it's
| not a question of weakening regulation; it's a matter of
| streamlining ways to get new technology certified faster - it
| only took 3 decades for the FAA to give the STC for unleaded
| gasoline etc etc.
| broeng wrote:
| Just to add a bit to this, as far as I understand, they
| didn't want the Max to be certified as something other than
| a normal 737, not because of certifying the aircraft, but
| because it would also mean all _pilots_ would need
| additional training or even new type ratings to fly it.
|
| Though, adding the MCAS, which in certain circumstances
| overrides the pilots instructions, should most certainly
| have triggered new training for the pilots for those
| situations, at the very least.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the reason that Boeing didn't want to
| certify the Max as anything other than a 737 is that this
| would have required expensive pilot-retraining for all
| airlines purchasing that aircraft, and this would have put
| Boeing in a bad position relative to Airbus, with the main
| factor being 'fuel burn per seat' where the Airbus A320neo
| had an initial advantage. The plane designs are nicely
| compared here (2014), esp. Fig 2:
|
| https://seekingalpha.com/article/2765285-the-battle-on-
| the-n...
|
| The shoddy software primarily responsible for the Boeing
| 737MAX disasters was introduced so that Boeing could market
| the planes to airlines as a standard 737 that required no
| expensive pilot training programs, as far as I can tell.
| The nature of the FAA's regulatory process seems mostly
| irrelevant here, unless rushing poorly designed products
| with huge risk profiles to market to help Boeing improve
| sales is something the FAA should promote... note also that
| Boeing lost around $30 billion in market value over the MAX
| debacle, which could have been avoided by FAA being _more_
| strict, even if that mean fewer plane orders.
| susanasj wrote:
| you are 100% correct about retraining. Flying Blind is a
| great book about the MAX failures at both Boeing and the
| FAA that I just finished a few weeks ago, highly
| recommend.
| masklinn wrote:
| > Going through the process to type certify the Max as
| anything other than a 737 would've been far more expensive
|
| Nonsense. Boeing regularly does that.
|
| > They added the MCAS because they didn't want the Max to
| be a different type, which meant starting the certification
| process from scratch.
|
| Also nonsense.
|
| They added the MCAS because they didn't want the Max to
| certify as anything but a different type because the
| _entire point_ of the Max program was for customers who
| exclusively fly 737s (like Southwest) to be able to fly a
| more efficient plane without needing to recertify _pilots_.
|
| Unlike Airbus, Boeing does not have unified profiles and
| accelerated cross-type training[0], so changing type is
| close to a full certification for crews, which translates
| to the crews being grounded for several weeks / a few
| months.
|
| [0] IIRC they have something along those lines for some
| planes released close to one another, but Airbus has it
| across most of the range, with the exception of the older
| types and the A220 which is not an Airbus plane per-se
| (it's a rebadging of the Bombardier CSeries)
| deeblering4 wrote:
| We enjoy accessible and safe air travel in no small part due to
| the strict regulations by FAA and EASA.
|
| Aviation is an industry where new products absolutely should
| not be fast tracked into deployment. The rules and regulations
| that are in place today were written in blood.
|
| If anything it's the weakening of these regulations (i.e.
| manufacturer self-certification) that enabled the MAX
| disasters.
| shostack wrote:
| Cat IIIc landings are no joke.
|
| https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/2019/september/...
| darksaints wrote:
| This is just as much the FCCs fault as the FAA. They were the
| ones that certified the frequency usage of these altimeters,
| and they should have noticed that these altimeters could
| experience interference from satcom frequencies over 400MHz
| (!!!) away. They could have stopped this decades ago, but they
| let it go on long enough to become a massive problem.
|
| A lot of people don't seem to grasp the magnitude of the
| spectrum lost to this snafu. At today's realizable spectral
| efficiencies, that is 2.5 TB/s of usable data throughput lost
| to the 400MHz guard band alone. It's also ~$130B worth of
| revenue that the FCC could have had if they could actually sell
| it.
| toast0 wrote:
| Sure, the receivers could experience interference from satcom
| frequencies in theory, but in practice satcom broadcasts are
| very low strength, so there was not much risk of harmful
| interference until the frequency was repurposed for
| terrestrial, high power broadcasts.
|
| You don't put hurricane windows on buildings that have no
| hurricane risk, and you don't put tight bandpass filters on
| receivers in the satellite bands.
|
| When hurricane patterns or satellite bands change, you get
| problems though.
| darksaints wrote:
| Satcom downlinks might be low power, but uplinks,
| especially from dedicated base stations (as opposed to
| satellite phones) can easily run into the hundreds of
| watts.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| The problem here was sort of ideal for falling through the
| cracks.
|
| The FAA is an executive administration ultimately organized
| under Dept. of Transportation. The FCC is an _independent_
| executive agency overseen, ultimately, by Congress.
|
| As a result, neither org has unilateral authority to tell the
| other to go pound sand, nor do their up-org leadership
| (ultimately, the President v. Congress).
|
| Their inability to find a resolution that didn't leave
| American pilots floundering is reflective of the inability of
| the Legislative and Executive branches to work together in
| modern federal governance, in general. Expect more issues
| like this in the future.
| ominous_prime wrote:
| It doesn't matter how easy the new certification process is, or
| how the technical specification said it _should_ have worked;
| this was existing technology that was otherwise working. You
| can't come in and step on existing infrastructure, then declare
| ex post facto that it should have gotten out of the way before
| you got there.
| susanasj wrote:
| The FAA being archaic was absolutely not the cause of the MAX
| incidents. Boeing released a plane with a single point of
| failure that failed, and they also neglected to tell pilots and
| FAA about this single point of failure because pilots unions
| would have insisted on training in a simulator (which costs
| Boeing money) and the FAA may have insisted on a redesign or
| also simulator training.
|
| Your comment is a complete mischaracterization of the MAX
| incidents beyond what even Boeing public relations was willing
| to do.
| registeredcorn wrote:
| Thank you for saying that! Every step that the FAA has taken
| is a result of: oversight, review, and documentation
| regarding the deaths of thousands of people that have
| occurred throughout the 20th/21st centuries. There is
| certainly things that could be done better, but the
| suggestion that the FAA being exceedingly careful in
| considering and certifying hardware/software changes to
| anything related to flying is, frankly, absurd.
|
| Piloting _cannot_ be a guessing game. It is a matter of
| _overwhelming_ expertise in: piloting, theory (aeronautics),
| communication, and social interaction (CRM). Changes to any
| of those areas should be viewed as a threat by default, zero
| trust [1] as it were, and only permitted to change under the
| most intense scrutiny a group of humans can apply to it.
|
| For anyone who is looking for a bit more context, consider
| the following:
|
| * 9H-EMU (May 2022):
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LE98jp11js
|
| * Boeing 737 Max Disaster(s):
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDEkH0zd3F8
|
| * Boeing 737 Max MCAS Recertification:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5b94ouECqsc
|
| Note: I am not a commercial pilot, but I do have an interest
| in the aviation industry.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_trust_security_model
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| It's relevant, at least.
|
| The single point of failure was a bad implementation detail
| of a bad feature, and that feature mostly existed because of
| how all-or-nothing the "aircraft type" training is.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| No, blame the FCC for not properly clearing frequencies used by
| _safety-critical equipment_ before reassigning them to 5G. They
| wanted to stick cellphones right next to altimeters, it should
| be their burden to make sure all the altimeters currently
| deployed won 't get hit with sideband noise.
|
| The FAA's approach is reasonable because safety-critical
| equipment is, well, critical to safety. The FCC got rolled by
| the 5G hype train and failed to do _its_ job - i.e. allocate
| frequencies to avoid unintended interference.
| DannyBee wrote:
| Sorry, but no. It's 220mhz away.
|
| That's insane. No properly operating equipment needs that
| sort of gap, and certainly not radar altimeters built with
| the proper selectivity.
|
| This is a 100% solved problem, and a 100% failure on the part
| of the equipment manufacturers, and whatever certification
| procedures exist for them.
|
| It simply is not that hard to test this, certify this, etc.
| naikrovek wrote:
| there is a 220MHz buffer between the two bands. that's eleven
| (11) terrestrial commercial FM radio bands worth of gap.
|
| 220MHz is sufficient if your altimeter radar has the proper
| selectivity.
|
| ground radars are so selective that you can have two radar
| devices operating at the same frequency _aimed at each other_
| without interference.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| The rollout of this was disgusting.
|
| The FCC only cared about selling the spectrum.
|
| The FAA only cared about minimizing the chance of any accidents.
|
| Neither was able to look at the science, come to a compromise,
| and then implement it in a joint way. It took the carriers, who
| had just paid $80b (from the article) to inject sanity into the
| approach via voluntary buffer zones.
|
| Turns out, single purpose regulatory agencies aren't great at
| considering matters outside their area of focus...
| jpmoral wrote:
| > The FAA only cared about minimizing the chance of any
| accidents.
|
| I think this is a good thing.
| rlpb wrote:
| No flying guarantees no accidents. This creates incentives in
| the wrong direction.
|
| See for example the safety achieved by modern technologies in
| modern light aircraft designs, and the lack of certification
| of most of these because of the expense of complying with FAA
| certification requirements. So the certified fleet has to use
| existing certified designs from the 60s which have not
| progressed as much in safety.
| themaninthedark wrote:
| That appears to be the stance of the NRC(Nuclear Regulatory
| Commission) as well.
| mannykannot wrote:
| You have a point about the FAA's handling of potentially
| safety-enhancing new technology, but that is not the issue
| here. Its safety concerns were verified by events after the
| compromise was put into effect (and the absence of any
| accidents as a consequence is not a counter-argument.)
|
| The root cause of this problem is, to an extent, a problem
| of agency silos. The FCC exercised its responsibility for
| controlling radio interference almost entirely by
| regulating what equipment can transmit, but radar
| altimeters are now giving false readings because they are
| overly sensitive to signals they receive outside of their
| allotted bands. While this may formally be part of the
| FCC's responsibility, it is clearly something the FAA could
| have been more concerned about.
| mort96 wrote:
| What interests would you want to see represented here other
| than minimizing the chance of accidents?
| Closi wrote:
| Well the concept of efficiency should be represented,
| financial responsibility, technological innovation, consumer
| and general public requirements, and then alongside this
| working collaboratively with other agencies to create joined-
| up policy (which involves balance between the needs of both
| agencies).
| Spooky23 wrote:
| So you weigh the importance of Verizon Wireless's ability
| to compete with TMobile for midband 5G equally with risk to
| human life?
|
| Give me a break.
| mort96 wrote:
| Sure but all of those come after the safety thing, right?
| We wouldn't want the most cost effective and innovative
| option to be chosen if it's unsafe?
| gjm11 wrote:
| Safety isn't binary.
|
| The only way to achieve _total_ aircraft safety is to
| have no aircraft. If the FAA literally cared about
| nothing other than safety they would have everything
| grounded, so clearly they do to some extent care about
| other things.
|
| Plausibly, a well-designed government would be _explicit_
| about the tradeoffs between safety and convenience and
| cost and so forth. In practice, that might be politically
| catastrophic. What usually happens, I think, is something
| like this: the official line is "keep risk down to a
| negligible level", where "negligible" is usually not
| quantified, and cost/inconvenience is largely ignored
| until everyone agrees that the risk has been made
| negligible, but below that threshold everyone's free to
| minimize cost/inconvenience.
|
| (This might actually end up being a pretty good strategy.
| Let's measure cost and convenience in dollars, because
| trading those off against one another isn't so
| problematic; then maybe a reasonable approximation to
| what we care about is that 1. each death is like burning
| $X where X is probably some number of millions, and 2.
| _having any major accident in a given year_ is like
| burning $Y where Y is many billions, because if there 's
| a major accident then the hit to public confidence means
| (a) big loss to the airline industry, (b) more people
| driving instead of flying, which means more deaths
| because flying is much safer, and wasting a lot of their
| time, and probably also more environmental damage. In
| that case, maybe the effect of #2 is actually not so very
| different from "big penalty if the risk goes above a
| negligible level". But it seems like we'd get better
| decisions overall by being more explicit about what we
| care about and how much.)
| ptero wrote:
| The approach I think you are proposing, safety above all,
| often leads to very low efficiency and in the end can
| lower total safety, for example encouraging shift to
| alternative modes of transport. Or by setting the
| certification bar so high that companies with new
| technologies, including those to improve safety, do not
| even bother to apply.
|
| An approach of joint utility, taking into account time,
| money and risk usually works better.
| 6stringmerc wrote:
| FAA is dual mandate though which is really a significant
| barrier to effectiveness in either sector.
| selimnairb wrote:
| It seems like this is a case of multi-agency regulatory capture
| (by industries with competing interests) resulting in behavior
| akin to a failed state. If the state can't arbitrate conflicts
| over public goods, what good is it?
| throwoutway wrote:
| > If the state can't arbitrate conflicts over public goods,
| what good is it?
|
| It could. Did anyone bring it to a court?
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| Is the only way for the fcc and faa to come to a joint
| conclusion for someone to spend millions in court forcing
| them to?
| dylan604 wrote:
| would it be really surprising if that was the case
| though?
| throwoutway wrote:
| Did I say that? Or am I responding to a extremely bizarre
| comment about the US being a "failed state" when parties
| found a solution without even exhausting the most obvious
| answer (given the US is a lawsuit-happy nation)
| hef19898 wrote:
| Let's see, one party focus on safety (minimizing the chance of
| accidents) and the other focises on revenue. I know which of
| the parties has more legs to stand upon. And don't pull out the
| MAX disaster, that is the proverbial exception that proofs the
| rule.
| darksaints wrote:
| You can call it focusing on revenue if you want, but the
| reason carriers are willing to pay so much for it is because
| it is so useful. The 280MHz of C-Band spectrum is close to
| 2TB/s of data throughput. That is a massive benefit to our
| society.
|
| If we only cared about safety, zero planes would be in the
| air right now. But sometimes usefulness outweighs safety.
|
| And the money-grubber argument could easily go both ways. The
| airlines bought radar altimeters that were out of spec. They
| could buy radar altimeters that are in spec and just as safe,
| but that would cost money. You could just as easily spin that
| as the FAA only caring about money.
| hef19898 wrote:
| The FAA isn't hetting money from manufacturers for
| certification taking longer. Altimeters out of spec are, if
| true, a no-go and finding for every continued airworthiness
| org out there.
| wongarsu wrote:
| If all the FAA cared about was minimizing the chance of
| accidents, then surely they would have fast-tracked the
| certification and rollout of better radar altimeters that can
| operate in the spectrum allotted to them?
|
| This seems like a case of the FAA's "never change a running
| system" running into a world that _is_ changing. A world that
| expects radio equipment to be better behaved than the stuff we
| built in the 80s.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| By FAA accounting, no change is less risky than any change.
|
| And given their track record of success and reality, I
| partially understand. The only way to avoid unknown unknowns
| is to maximally simplify a system, and that starts with not
| introducing components uncharacterized by decades of real
| world use.
|
| Obvious parallel in tech: database systems.
| wongarsu wrote:
| In a world where nothing changes, or at least doesn't
| change without an impact assessment by the FAA, they are
| kind of right.
|
| The problem is that aircraft inhabit the same world as the
| rest of us, so sometimes their environment does change from
| things outside FAA control. And at that point, delaying
| technology updates for nearly half a century becomes a
| major liability.
| the_mitsuhiko wrote:
| I wonder if Europe just lucked out there or if someone there
| actually had that in mind when setting the spectrum.
| kranke155 wrote:
| The European Union is surprisingly technocratic, which is why a
| lot of complaints from Americans about EU regulation seem
| archaic to us. (Ie the debate that always pops here in HN about
| the EU restricting innovation by forcing chargers - this all
| sounds silly to Europeans because we've never seen them make a
| bad decision and stick to it for decades after it's outdated US
| style).
| JasonFruit wrote:
| I'm not able to parse the bit about "the EU restricting
| innovation by forcing chargers". What kind of chargers are we
| talking about?
| danhor wrote:
| The EU requires a USB-C PD compatible charging port for
| smartphones and other small devices starting in 2024(?).
|
| This is primarily directed at lightning.
| stevenhubertron wrote:
| Has 5g brought anything positive to this world? So much hype but
| all it seems to have done is make flying more unsafe, create more
| ugly towers in cities and discharge my phone faster. Seems like
| boondoggle territory to me.
| sneaky_verily wrote:
| It enables smart cities with more surveillance to keep us all
| safe.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| I've learned that every time I'm near a city center and my
| phone loses connection or gets very slow, there's a little "5G"
| showing in the status bar.
|
| Every damn time.
|
| Sometimes I'm able to mess with the network settings to turn
| off 5G and go back to 4G, and then my phone works fine again.
| jollyllama wrote:
| Don't forget, it's impacted weather forecasting too.
| zackmorris wrote:
| Came here to say the same thing:
|
| https://www.salon.com/2022/03/14/how-5g-could-send-
| weather-f...
|
| The central issue here is greed. The bands used for science
| (like 23.8 GHz) are critical, but not enough concern was
| given to them, so neighboring bands were auctioned off
| without proper consideration of consequences from
| interference, due to lobbying pressure from
| telecommunications companies. From the article:
|
| _While the FCC 's 2019 auction of the 24 GHz spectrum band
| generated $2 billion in revenue for the Department of the
| Treasury, the costs from severe weather could be much
| greater._
|
| This is the type of unintended consequence that comes with
| privatization of government services. What looks like a cost
| savings in the short term ends up being a cost increase in
| the long term. See also: the commons, natural monopoly.
| uncomputation wrote:
| Faster data rates, lower network congestion, more efficient
| spectrum allocation, and private commercial networks for IoT.
| There are many benefits. Although, perhaps marketing has
| oversold those benefits that will be passed into consumers.
| Largely, 5G will benefit network operators, carriers, and
| industry.
|
| 5G has not appreciably made "flying more unsafe." If anything,
| this is a good push to start updating altimeters to spec
| (installing bandpass filters, better testing) which actually
| will make flying _more safe_ because currently these altimeters
| are susceptible to out of band frequencies.
| [deleted]
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