Day: January 22, 2022

FAA stalled almost 2 years — already cleared 78% of planes in one week

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The Federal Aviation Administration’s fight against AT&T’s and Verizon’s new 5G deployment appears to be coming to a temporary close, with the FAA having cleared about 78 percent of US planes for landing in low-visibility conditions. Airline CEOs are striking an upbeat tone, with one saying the process of ensuring that airplane altimeters work in 5G areas is “really not that complicated.”…More approvals will presumably be announced soon, bringing the US closer to 100 percent capacity…

The FAA didn’t start its process of evaluating the actual altimeters used by airplanes after February 2020, when the Federal Communications Commission approved the use of C-Band spectrum for 5G. The FAA also didn’t start this evaluation process after the FCC auctioned off the spectrum to wireless carriers in February 2021. Instead, the FAA continued arguing that 5G deployment should be blocked long after carriers started preparing their equipment and towers to use the C-band.

Harold Feld…senior VP of consumer-advocacy group Public Knowledge, told Ars today…he finds it “increasingly difficult to understand the FAA’s rationale around any of these things, especially given the statements from the [airline] CEOs who actually own and operate this equipment that ‘yeah we’ve done tests, and yeah there’s no problem.'”

Sounds like the FAA needs to replace more than a few bureaucrats. Replace them with techs who know how to test the hardware, test the software and test the regulations.

Doomed A68 iceberg dumped 1 trillion tons of water into the ocean over 3 years

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After the world’s largest iceberg snapped off of the Antarctic Peninsula in July 2017, it drifted north on a three-year death march, shedding an unfathomable amount of meltwater into the sea. Now, a new study of the doomed iceberg (named A68a) reveals just how much water the infamous mega-berg actually lost — and how that could impact the local ecosystem for generations to come…

Using observations from five satellites, the study authors calculated how much the iceberg’s area and thickness changed as it drifted north through Antarctica’s Weddell Sea and into the relatively warm waters of the Scotia Sea. There, while the berg appeared to be headed for a direct collision with South Georgia island, iceberg A68a lost more than 152 billion tons (138 billion metric tons) of fresh water in just three months…

“This is a huge amount of meltwater, and the next thing we want to learn is whether it had a positive or negative impact on the ecosystem around South Georgia,” lead study author Anne Braakmann-Folgmann, a researcher at the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling in the U.K., said in a statement. “Because A68a took a common route across the Drake Passage, we hope to learn more about icebergs taking a similar trajectory, and how they influence the polar oceans.”

And this is just the beginning, folks. As global warming proceeds, processes like these will reoccur. Better start learning about results and side effects.