“I can’t believe that it’s come to this.” Airline and telecom leaders sift through the mess left them by U.S. officials who botched this week’s rollout of new 5G services.
“It wasn’t our finest hour, I think, as a country,” Doug Parker, chief executive of American Airlines Group Inc., said on an earnings call Thursday.
That view is backed by the Federal Communications Commission, which controls commercial airwaves, but not the FAA, which is responsible for air safety. Telecom-industry groups say aviation officials disrupted multibillion-dollar investments with last-minute alarm based on thin evidence. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration, NTIA, a federal office authorized to mediate disputes over managing public radio waves, had shuffled through several temporary leaders over nearly three years before a permanent chief filled the role last week.
The agreement Tuesday by AT&T and Verizon to restrict 5G signals around major airports helped avert broad disruption to passengers but the rushed process still had consequences. After the new signal began beaming to customers, some commuter flights on smaller jets were barred from landing Thursday in San Francisco because the FAA hadn’t yet cleared them for low-visibility conditions.
Aviation officials sought to delay an FCC auction of C-band spectrum licenses, which started in late 2020. A letter signed by Mr. Dickson and then-Transportation Department general counsel Steven Bradbury to the NTIA warned of possible interference with radar altimeters in aircraft. Tom Wheeler, the FCC chairman under President Barack Obama from 2013 to 2017, agreed that the commission’s engineering judgment was sound. But he said the federal government should underwrite altimeter upgrades requested by the aviation industry. “If there’s $81 billion sitting in the U.S. Treasury, it should get fixed,” he said. “There’s the money.”
By early January, government officials endorsed a wireless-industry plan to launch the new 5G networks while dimming the signals near airports. The cellphone carriers agreed to delay the rollout until Jan. 19, giving the aviation industry more time to reduce disruptions by clearing certain aircraft and airports as safe for low-visibility landings that relied on especially sensitive equipment.
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