What You Need to Know About the 5G Risk to Aircraft

01.25.2022 // Jim Anderton

Jim Anderton looks at how 5G wireless technology – which promises to deliver high-bandwidth data with very little latency – could pose issues for aircraft, especially commercial aviation. While many providers look to 5G not only for high-speed video streaming, connected transportation and industrial IoT, there are critical aircraft systems (in particular, radar altimeters) that may be affected by the 5G rollout:

As the name implies, radar altimeters work like a radar set except pointed downward. High-frequency radiation is transmitted down from the airplane, is reflected by the ground and received back at the airplane. The instrument then uses time-of-flight and frequency shift to infer altitude with precision and accuracy that can even allow completely blind landings in commercial service. It goes without saying that other transmissions on nearby frequencies have the potential to jam the signals, with potentially disastrous effects for aircraft approaching a runway.

Read more on engineering.com