Inside the Government Fiasco That Nearly Closed the U.S. Air System

The prospect sounded terrifying. A nationwide rollout of new wireless technology was set for January, but the aviation industry was warning it would cause mass calamity: 5G signals over new C-band networks could interfere with aircraft safety equipment, causing jetliners to tumble from the sky or speed off the end of runways. Aviation experts warned of “catastrophic failures leading to multiple fatalities.”

To stave off potential disaster, the Federal Aviation Administration prepared drastic preventive measures that would cancel thousands of flights, stranding passengers from coast to coast and grounding cargo shipments. “The nation’s commerce will grind to a halt,” the airlines’ trade group predicted.

On Jan. 18, following nail-biting negotiations involving CEOs, a Cabinet secretary and White House aides, an eleventh-hour agreement averted these threats of aviation armageddon. Verizon and AT&T agreed not to turn on more than 600 5G transmission towers near the runways of 87 airports and to reduce the power of others.

Disaster was averted. But the fact that it was such a close call was shocking nonetheless. How did a long-planned technology upgrade result in a standoff that seemed to threaten public safety and one of the nation’s largest industries? The reasons are numerous, but it’s undeniable that the new 5G deployment represents an epic debacle by multiple federal agencies, the regulatory equivalent of a series of 300-pound football players awkwardly fumbling the ball as it bounces crazily into and out of their arms.

More than anything, a deep examination of the fiasco reveals profound failures in two federal agencies — the Federal Communications Commission and the FAA — that are supposed to serve the public. In the case of the FCC, the agency not only advocated for the interests of the telecommunications industry but adopted its worldview, scorning evidence of risk and making cooperation and compromise nearly impossible. In the case of the FAA, the agency inexplicably stayed silent and passively watched preparations for 5G proceed over a period of years even as the aviation industry sounded ever more dire warnings that the new networks could put air safety at risk.

That’s the alarming picture that emerges, in new detail, in interviews with 51 participants and observers in the 5G rollout, along with a review of thousands of pages of documents. The problems have spanned a Republican and Democratic administration. The process first ran off the rails under President Donald Trump. It then festered under the administration of President Joe Biden — which ProPublica’s reporting shows impeded the FAA when it finally decided to act — until a crisis forced an intervention.

For now, the truce between the FCC and telecom companies, on one side, and the FAA and aviation companies, on the other, is holding. The parties have mostly tempered their hostile rhetoric, sounded hopeful notes of “coexistence” and have begun to collaborate. The FAA is allowing the wireless companies to slowly turn on more 5G towers as planes mostly keep flying. (About a thousand regional jets, mostly used by JetBlue, American, Delta and United, are currently barred from landing in low-visibility conditions at many airports over fears of equipment interference.)

But the underlying issues are far from resolved. Aviation companies say they need much more time — perhaps two years or more — to upgrade or replace all the equipment vulnerable to 5G interference, according to Bob Fox, a United Airlines pilot now serving as national safety coordinator for the Air Line Pilots Association, a key player in the drama.

The telecom companies have no interest in such a lengthy time frame: Their agreement with the government is set to expire on July 5, and they have made no commitment to extending the restrictions on their towers past that date. The companies have been exhibiting a willingness to make short-term compromises, but they’re also showing hints of frustration that they can’t seem to bring the process to a resolution.

For its part, the FCC seems aggrieved. It overwhelmingly blames the aviation agency for the problems and simultaneously says it’s cooperating with the FAA — while continuing to insist that any claims that 5G will threaten airplanes are pure fantasy. The rhetoric of the FCC chief is almost identical to that of the industry she regulates. As recently as last month, Jessica Rosenworcel, the Biden-appointed FCC chair, dismissed aviation concerns as, in effect, a shakedown — a ploy to get telecom companies to fund a nationwide upgrade of airplane equipment. Referring to the air-safety devices that the aviation industry says could be compromised by 5G, she said in an interview with ProPublica, “Has anyone spec’d the cost of altimeter replacement?”

And a whole new telecom-aviation conflict could soon emerge. T-Mobile and other wireless companies are approved to roll out additional 5G service at the end of 2023, using a C-band frequency even closer to the one used by the airplane safety equipment. Like other participants in the process, T-Mobile says it’s committed to safety and to finding a reasonable solution. But if that rollout unfolds in a way that resembles the last one in the slightest way, a reasonable solution may be elusive.

There was a time, a century ago, when radio was the hottest new technology in the land. Stations sprouted up everywhere, and they routinely used the same frequencies. The result was electronic bedlam: Programming was regularly interrupted by rival stations, police-radio chatter and amateur enthusiasts. Congressional legislation lamented “the present chaos of jazz bands, sermons, crop reports, sporting services, concerts and whatnot running simultaneously on the same wave lengths.” In one celebrated case, a wealthy Illinois bank president obtained a court order against a local 18-year-old whose radio transmissions had kept him from listening to broadcasts of election-night results at his home.

There was a critical need for a neutral arbiter to make decisions about who could occupy which part of the airwaves. All this led to the creation of a federal agency to regulate radio, which ultimately morphed into the FCC in 1934. A big part of its mission, as the new agency told Congress, was to make “equitable distribution of the frequencies ... as congestion increases.”

The march of technology over the 88 years that followed can be understood as a series of battles for the airwaves. Virtually every important communications technology, from television and satellites to cellphones and GPS, has required bandwidth. The FCC was there to dole out frequencies and referee the conflicts. There were massive financial stakes in many of the decisions. They launched entire industries, while burying or transforming others.

As more and more technologies crowded into a finite set of frequencies, the opportunities for one technology to interfere with another only increased. In the mid-1990s, new digital phone technology unintentionally triggered a buzzing in some hearing aids, while interference from police radios sometimes prompted powered wheelchairs to randomly accelerate or brake, leading to serious injuries. In 2010, the shift to digital television required the replacement of wireless microphones used by actors in Broadway shows, referees at NFL games and pastors at Sunday church services.

By the time 5G approached, the FCC had long ago developed an acclaimed system of selling spectrum — reserved areas of the airwaves — for commercial use, which generated large sums of money for the federal government: public auctions. The agency’s first such auction was held in 1994. Over the years that followed, the FCC successfully used the process 110 times, raising more than $233 billion. The auctions’ sophisticated format helped win a Nobel Prize for two Stanford economists who designed them.

But the Trump administration didn’t initially seem inclined to leave 5G decisions to the FCC. The administration saw the fifth generation of cellular technology, with its faster speeds and automation efficiencies for industry, as its single biggest communications initiative.

Top Trump officials viewed the technology through the prism of competition with China. Many in the administration also expressed fears that Huawei Technologies, a dominant maker of 5G hardware, might be a conduit for Chinese government surveillance, posing a national-security threat. (Huawei has always denied such claims.) Trump lieutenants began employing a nationalist battle cry: America needed to “win the race to 5G” against China.

The Trump administration veered in multiple directions in pursuit of that goal. In January 2018, National Security Council officials circulated a plan to create a government-run 5G network. This idea was jettisoned almost as soon as it was proposed, amid criticism that this would constitute socialism.

Others in the Trump orbit proposed ideas as well. Attorney General William Barr at one point suggested that the U.S. government, in the interest of developing China-free 5G networks, buy controlling interests in Nokia and Ericsson, the European telecom equipment companies. Republican insiders such as consultant Karl Rove, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale promoted a partnership in which the Defense Department would lease unused spectrum to Rivada Networks, a company backed by GOP donor Peter Thiel. This approach was embraced by a Trump campaign spokesperson and then promptly repudiated by the White House. Trump himself declared that the administration’s 5G plan should be “private-sector driven and private-sector led.”

Eventually the White House moved on to other obsessions. The FCC, and its chairman, became the driving force in the race to 5G. The agency’s brash leader, 44 when he took the role in 2017, was Ajit Pai. He had been an FCC commissioner before being elevated by Trump. Pai’s agency was legendarily friendly to the companies it regulated, with commissioners and key staff routinely moving to and from lucrative posts in the industry. Pai himself had spent two years early in his career as an in-house lawyer at Verizon and later worked at a law firm that served telecom clients. Since stepping down at the end of the Trump administration, Pai has decamped to a private-equity firm whose portfolio includes telecom and broadband companies.

At the FCC, Pai joined the wireless companies in evangelizing for 5G. He would make it the central initiative of his tenure. A speedy rollout, Pai proclaimed, would “transform our economy, boost economic growth and improve our quality of life.” He regularly cited a report proclaiming that 5G could create up to 3 million new U.S. jobs and $500 billion in economic growth — without noting that those rosy figures came from a study commissioned by the wireless industry’s lobbying group.

Under Pai, the path to 5G initially continued to zigzag. After the White House abandoned the central plan, the FCC turned in a new direction, one that would put a few foreign satellite companies in charge of the process. At issue was the so-called C-band, a patch of wireless real estate viewed as the sweet spot for 5G. Wireless companies coveted C-band spectrum for its ability to transmit big chunks of data rapidly over long distances; it would maximize 5G speeds while minimizing the number of expensive cell towers and transmitters the companies needed.

That spectrum was owned by the federal government. But it was then being used with the government’s consent, free of charge, by four foreign satellite companies that relayed radio and TV signals around the globe. Sensing opportunity, the companies banded together and made an audacious proposal: They, the non-rent-paying users of the spectrum, would sell it to U.S. wireless companies and keep most of the expected tens of billions of dollars for themselves. (They agreed to make a voluntary contribution to the federal Treasury from the proceeds.) This “market-based solution,” the satellite companies claimed, would be the fastest way to get 5G networks up and running.

Pai seriously entertained this approach for a year. The plan eventually fizzled in the face of fierce opposition led by Louisiana Republican Sen. John Kennedy, who expressed outrage that foreign satellite companies would reap most of the money from a sale of U.S. government spectrum.

Stymied, the FCC swerved back to its traditional approach: a public spectrum auction, in this case for a big chunk of the C-band. The agency decided that the winning bidders would pay the satellite companies up to $14.7 billion for quickly vacating those frequencies and retooling on different frequencies. That, the agency hoped, would avoid costly, time-consuming lawsuits by the satellite companies.

A $14.7 billion payout was staggering, but it was an accepted FCC practice to arrange compensation for companies affected by its spectrum actions. The agency, however, would make no such provisions for another group warning of far graver consequences: the U.S. aviation industry.

The battle that would threaten to ground American aviation centered on an electronic device about the size of a toaster. Called a radio altimeter, it’s used to track an aircraft’s altitude during takeoff and landing.

Radio altimeters, which became standard gear in the early 1970s, work by bouncing an electronic signal off the ground, sending their readings instantly to the cockpit. This is important for low-visibility landings, at night or in bad weather. It matters at other times, too: Radio altimeters on many commercial jets feed their data into automated navigation and crash-avoidance systems, sometimes controlling the engines and braking systems. About 50,000 planes and helicopters in the U.S. carry radio altimeters.

Aviation industry anxiety about the peril of radio altimeter failure inevitably cites a Turkish Airlines Boeing 737 that crashed in 2009 while attempting a landing in Amsterdam. Nine passengers and crew members died. An investigation revealed that the disaster originated with a malfunctioning altimeter, whose faulty readings triggered the jet’s auto-throttle to cut power during the final landing approach.

The FCC’s plans to use the C-band for 5G rekindled these fears. The problem was that the upper part of the C-band is where radio altimeters operate, prompting concern that nearby 5G transmissions would cause them to spit out false readings or stop working. Because most altimeters had been built and installed decades earlier, when there was nothing noisy in their electronic neighborhood, they hadn’t been designed to screen out the likes of 5G.

Fights over the FCC’s efforts to cram ever more users into limited spectrum became unusually common, and heated, during the Pai regime, and it wasn’t just the aviation industry that protested. Other orders granting telecom companies various 5G frequencies prompted complaints that they would disrupt networks used for satellite communications, weather forecasting, agriculture, self-driving cars, global-positioning services and military weapons systems. One of the FCC actions, still being fought, drew opposition from 14 federal agencies and departments. Again and again, the FCC, backed by the Trump White House, brushed those pleas aside. “Agencies raising concerns about the impact of 5G were just sort of being mowed down by the FCC,” according to a former high-level Trump official involved in spectrum disputes.

Starting in 2018, more than a dozen aviation groups and companies told the FCC they worried that interference with radio altimeters could cause a deadly plane crash. They urged the agency to work with the FAA and delay an auction until it had identified and eliminated any risk. Aviation-industry officials also argued that the telecom companies, or the Treasury, should fund billions of dollars’ worth of altimeter upgrades to eliminate interference problems from the 5G C-band signals.

But the FCC didn’t think there was a problem to solve. The agency embraced the wireless industry’s view, which was to deny that the new 5G networks posed any risk to aviation safety.

“One of the things we built into the way spectrum auctions work is that various people need to be paid off,” said Blair Levin, who was FCC chief of staff when the agency first deployed its auctions. Levin said the 5G process was handled differently: “The airlines came and said, ‘We have this problem.’ Nobody asked: ‘What do you need to fix the problem? Do you need $2 billion? Do you need $4 billion? Do you need $6 billion?’ Ajit just said: ‘We don’t care; we don’t think your concerns are legitimate.’”

Pai defends that position. “The FCC’s career staff did a terrific job analyzing the facts,” he told ProPublica, “and had demonstrated to all the commissioners at the FCC that there was no credible case made for the possible interference with aviation altimeters… No legitimate objective engineering work would find a legitimate case for those arguments.” The FCC was the final word on spectrum allocation. End of discussion.

But that ignored a key fact: The FAA was the final word on airplane safety, and it was becoming more concerned about the risk to radio altimeters. And unlike other agencies, the FAA had sweeping authority to order dramatic steps to avoid any chance of a fatal accident.

The FAA had massive power — but it didn’t seem inclined to use it. For starters, like more than one agency under Trump, it suffered from instability at the top, with an interim leader for 18 months. And the FAA was on the defensive in the wake of two Boeing 737 MAX crashes that killed a total of 346 people and tarnished the agency’s reputation.

That meant that when Steve Dickson took over as chair in the summer of 2019, the FAA was distracted by the Boeing mess, according to an agency source. And in Dickson, the FAA seemed to have the temperamental opposite of the aggressive and ambitious Pai. Dickson, who was 61 when he took the agency helm, was a onetime Air Force fighter pilot who had recently retired from a three-decade career at Delta, first as a pilot and then as a company safety executive. (Along the way he also got a law degree.)

Perhaps because of his background in the military or perhaps just by dint of disposition, Dickson adhered strictly to the chain of command. Methodical, cautious and measured — a top deputy said he’s never heard him raise his voice — Dickson was loath to take steps outside official procedures, and those official procedures placed a lot of emphasis on filing papers. So that’s what Dickson and his agency did.

Dickson did not, for example, call Pai to hash out the 5G issue. He did not march to the White House to sound the alarm. He issued no press releases to bring attention to the looming problem. The agency’s only official expression of concern in 2019 was a two-page letter from an agency engineer to a Commerce Department panel charged with resolving government spectrum disputes. It urged the FCC to delay any C-band auction until a technical study the FAA had funded had arrived and “any interference mitigations have been considered.” (Dickson declined to comment for this article.)

The FAA’s passivity was particularly striking given the mounting concern in the aviation industry. A pair of reports by aviation research groups intensified those anxieties. The first was a preliminary lab study, conducted by a government-industry research cooperative at Texas A&M University. It found all seven radio altimeters it tested were susceptible to interference. It too urged further analysis. The report was submitted to the FCC in late 2019.

But the FCC didn’t wait. On Feb. 28, 2020, it voted to authorize the C-band sale, and it scheduled the auction for Dec. 8. The FCC’s 258-page report and order devoted just six paragraphs to aviation safety, much of it agreeing with a T-Mobile-sponsored report that dismissed aviation concerns. The FCC contended that its precautions, including leaving a patch of spectrum vacant between 5G transmissions and the altimeter frequency, would be sufficient.

The FCC order made clear whose problem this was to solve. “Well-designed equipment should not ordinarily receive any significant interference (let alone harmful interference) given these circumstances,” the order stated. “We expect the aviation industry to ... take appropriate action, if necessary, to ensure protection of such devices.”

The aviation companies didn’t see it that way. Their concerns escalated in October 2020 with the issuance of a 231-page report by the RTCA, a nonprofit aviation industry research organization originally known as the Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics. It found that 5G posed “a major risk” to altimeters with “the potential for broad impacts to aviation operations in the United States, including the possibility of catastrophic failures leading to multiple fatalities.” It too urged the FCC, FAA and industries to work together to tackle the problem.

The opposite happened. The telecom and aviation industries embraced diametrically opposing views of reality. They assailed each other’s studies and methodologies. The wireless advocates declared that nearly 40 other countries had already deployed 5G on the C-band near airports, under conditions similar to those contemplated in the U.S., without incident. Aviation allies replied that power levels and other limits on 5G operations near overseas airports were meaningfully different. Each side accused the other of refusing to share technical data needed to assess the issue.

The two sides also viewed risk in radically different ways. From the aviation perspective, the wireless industry simply couldn’t fathom its hypercautious safety culture, which, given the horrific consequences of an accident, demands that any critical equipment be proven to pose a probability of failure of no more than one in a billion. “If there’s the possibility of a risk to the flying public,” the FAA’s “5G and Aviation Safety” website notes, “we are obligated to restrict the relevant flight activity until we can prove it is safe.”

Aviation companies were getting increasingly nervous. Yet the FAA continued to sit on its hands. Finally, with the 5G auction just a week away, in December 2020, the FAA took action of sorts: It drafted a letter.

What happened next involves a tiny government agency few people have heard of. Buried deep inside the U.S. Department of Commerce, it’s called the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. It advises the president on spectrum issues and mediates fights between federal agencies. Its job is to help resolve exactly the sort of conflict that was raging over 5G.

In the Trump administration, however, the NTIA was in disarray. A Government Accountability Office report would find that the agency lacked a “formalized” process for weighing in on spectrum issues. The last Senate-confirmed chief of the agency had abruptly quit in May 2019. By November 2020, it was on its third acting administrator, former Michigan State law professor Adam Candeub.