Congress Rips FAA, FCC Over Airline 5G Debacle

Lawmakers on Thursday skewered two government agencies at a Congressional hearing, asking how the standoff over the implementation of 5G C-Band wireless networks reached such an impasse.

Members of the House of Representatives Transportation and Infrastructure subcommittee took the Federal Aviation

Administration and the Federal Communications Commission to task, saying the two agencies never should have let the debate over 5G come down to the last minute as it did last month.

It took until the week of implementation for the two sides to come to a temporary solution in which the telecommunications giants agreed to delay installation of service near airports.

The FAA backed the airlines, which claimed that the new 5G service would disrupt airplane instrumentation and operations systems that would cause massive delays. The FCC backed the telecoms, saying 5G had already been installed in numerous places around the world without incident.

The FAA and FCC ended up playing “chicken with one another – or whatever ridiculousness happened – and now we ended up threatening aviation safety. We had flights canceled. … It’s embarrassing,” U.S. Representative Garret Graves said, according to Reuters News Service.

Added fellow Congressman John Katko: “You knew this was bubbling up for a long time. How the hell did we get to the point where we had so much brinkmanship going on with this? We had five years in the making.”

FAA Administrator Steve Dickson agreed. In his testimony to Congress, Dickson said the dispute could have been resolved more smoothly.

“The process did not serve anyone well,” Dickson said. “It did not serve the aviation community well, certainly the FAA, and it also did not serve the telecommunications industry well. And we certainly need to do better as a country.”

House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Peter DeFazio said the whole saga showed how “the current interagency process for auctioning off spectrum is completely broken.”

DeFazio backed the airlines.

“Having a dropped call is way less serious than having a dropped airplane out of the sky,” he said.

FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel was asked to testify but had a scheduling conflict and could not appear before Congress.