Is 5G dangerous for aircraft safety? In the United States, 5G will not take off right away. Indeed, American civil aviation, the Federal Aviation Administration, has been warning of the consequences of 5G on aircraft safety for several years, and this in the face of strong pressure from mobile telephone operators.
Why would 5G be dangerous for aircraft safety? To land in bad weather, a radio altimeter bandwidth is used by airplanes. This bandwidth is between 4.2 and 4.4 GHz. However, the bandwidth of 5G is between 3.7 and 4 GHz. This cohabitation between services using close bandwidths is not new. Guillaume Ferré, lecturer at the National Polytechnic Institute of Bordeaux, explains that telecommunications systems “ are designed to avoid problems on the surrounding spectrum. There must be vigilance on this subject, but 5G does not pose a new problem “. The radio altimeters would be implicated: ” radio altimeters pick up frequencies they shouldn’t pick up. What we want to avoid is that a passenger turns on their 5G on the plane when approaching the airport and this prevents the altimeters from working correctly. », Explains Gilles Brégant, Director General of the National Frequency Agency in France.
A real fight is taking place between airlines and operators A&T and Verizon, who bought these new frequencies last February and who want to launch 5G as soon as possible.
In the United States, this problem is more significant than in France, because the bandwidths are closer. In France, the bandwidth used for 5G is between 3.4 and 3.8 GHz. What’s more, ” protection zones have been set up around seventeen major French airports in order to limit the transmission power of 5G antennas in the immediate vicinity of these “, Indicated the general direction of the civil aviation to the newspaper The world.