I completely agree that Boeing needs to issue a recall order on all affected hardware and provide a fix. This should be painful, it is basically punishment for trying to cut corners on safety equipment.
I believe no agency should consider downstream effects of applying the law, to ensure fairness. Why should Boeing get a pass but say an out of compliance robotic lawnmower gets enforced?
(I do agree this is Boeing's issue to fix, 200MHz guard band is huge, Boeing needs filters)
Second, the FCC was already involved in their development and certification.
Third, these radars have been in operation for decades.
You are talking about thousands of planes that have to be modified to accommodate telcos. If anyone should pick up the tab for this it is Verizon and AT&T.
That makes their domination of spectrum far outside their range worse.
If anything, threaten to retroactively charge them for all that bandwidth.
Who cares? The comment you are responding to says "they did shoddy work on the altimeters." That doesn't mean that Boeing built the altimeters.
They specced them, procured, inspected, installed and sold it with the whole airplane. If the pilots' chair collapses, that's shoddy work on part of Boeing, and nobody would talk about how they are just buying the chairs from someone. Same with the radio altimeters.
> Third, these radars have been in operation for decades.
Ok? Sometimes corners cut bite you in the backside only after decades.
There is one question which matters: Are the 5G towers transmitting on frequencies assigned to the use of radio altimeters or not? If they are they must stop. If the radio altimeters degrade or might degrade because of transmission outside of their assigned range and guard then they are faulty.
Perhaps Boeing should have bid of the spectrum that their products depend on being unused.
This is essentially the government leasing out previously unused federal land for mineral extraction and a nearby rancher saying "it ruins my view," only with safety concerns added in.
This spectrum can’t simultaneously be “unused” and a problem for radar altimeters.
The allocation of the spectrum is only for transmission, and the radar altimeters in question passed that spec. It says nothing about receive, and due to how radar altimeter works, it's much, much harder to filter out interfering signals from systems like 5G (5G in case of interference will just drop maximum data rate as it filters mismatched codes or incorrect checksums, radar altimeter might return incorrect altitude)
An modern commercial plane has tens of thousands of suppliers supplying millions of parts. No airline [1] could even imagine to have the staff to manage OEM relationships with that many indirect suppliers. That is what you pay Boeing for.
If that was the case no airline could afford to buy more than 1 type of plane or certainly not more than one manufacturer, you would need to handle all the suppliers in the industry?! it would be incredibly inefficient to do this for them individually .
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[1] Maybe United , American or Delta could have that kind of staff, but given the airlines operating margins in the last 2-3 decades even that seems unlikely
And you're grossly overstating how many suppliers are on a commercial aircraft. There are in total an average of 30 tier-1s on a modern airframe, and yes, airlines are expected to work with all of them. Radio Altimeters are typically made by avionics suppliers i.e. Collins, Thales, or Honeywell for Part-25 commercial airliners.
There's a reason why the only time two airplanes are identical is when they roll from assembly line as part of the very same order with same spec, and never again.
Boeing can argue with and sue their suppliers, but that's not a problem for anyone but them and their supplier.
If I made routers that flood the EM spectrum with random crap, even if their wifi 'worked' they wouldn't be fit for use, either.