I fly for a living and I have spent thousands of hours managing approaches, diversions, and the slow, ugly cascade that follows a weather system that outmatches planning. In the last 18 months passengers and operators have watched two different kinds of disruptions converge. One is the familiar disruptor, severe weather and winter systems that knock airports and crews out of sequence. The other is a technology policy fight centered on C-band 5G and how close new wireless power can safely come to sensitive aircraft radios, particularly radio altimeters. Both problems are operational first and political second, and both expose weaknesses in how the system absorbs shocks.

Put bluntly, weather still causes the most immediate, visible chaos. The Department of Transportation reported a massive spike in consumer complaints for December 2022 tied to cancellations and stranded passengers, with more than half of those complaints aimed at a single carrier during the holiday period. That incident is a reminder that airline networks are tightly coupled. When weather forces a large number of cancellations in a short window, crew and aircraft position imbalances cascade for days. Regulators and airlines must treat this as a systems problem.

The 5G debate is different in character but it intersects with weather in important ways. C-band 5G operates in frequencies near those used by aircraft radio altimeters, equipment that provides precise height above ground during the last moments of an approach and landing. The FAA and industry flagged the potential for harmful interference to some altimeter models before wide scale C-band deployment. That risk is not about cruise clearances in good weather. The risk grows when crews rely on radio altimeter data in low-visibility approaches, on contaminated or slippery runways, or when automated systems use altimeter inputs to transition flight modes.

In practice the U.S. response has been a patchwork of mitigations. Wireless carriers agreed to buffer zones and temporary mitigations around a set of airports while the FAA and avionics makers evaluated altimeter susceptibility. The FAA published notices and approvals for specific altimeters and runways and later moved to formalize retrofit and equipment requirements through airworthiness directives. That step recognizes a simple fact: if radio altimeters are to live next to higher power commercial wireless networks, some aircraft will need upgraded or filtered altimeters.

Operationally this is what mattered to pilots and schedulers. On a day with poor visibility a surface movement or approach that would otherwise be routine can become unavailable to aircraft equipped with older altimeters. That reduces runway options and forces reroutes and diversions. Those limits are not hypothetical. Airlines warned federal officials that, without mitigations, 5G rollout could worsen operational impacts at certain airports. The FAA and carriers have been working to narrow the footprint of affected operations, but the interplay with weather remains the key multiplier.

A few practical lessons come out of the last year and a half that operators, regulators, and technologists should take seriously:

  • Treat resilience as an operational priority, not a side project. Weather will continue to be the primary shock. Airlines should build schedules, crew rosters, and recovery plans that expect multi-day disruptions rather than optimizing only for on-time performance in calm conditions. The DOT complaint numbers show how fast passengers lose confidence when things go wrong.

  • Fix the instrumentation gap. Where radio altimeters are used as inputs to automated flight controls, regulators should require documented tolerance to neighboring wireless bands or require mitigations such as RF filters. The FAA moves toward airworthiness directives and retrofit timelines are a reasonable, if imperfect, attempt to close that gap. The faster we replace or harden vulnerable altimeters, the smaller the operational footprint of mitigations will be.

  • Coordinate spectrum policy with aviation early and quantitatively. The 5G-C band rollout shows the cost of rolling out high power services without fully harmonized, aviation-specific mitigations. Data sharing about tower locations, power levels, and antenna tilt should be routine and automated so aviation authorities can run deterministic interference models before deployment. The temporary buffer zones were helpful but they are a blunt instrument.

  • Runway and procedure redundancy matters. Airports with multiple usable approaches and runways weather proofed for low-visibility operations are less likely to see flights cancelled when either weather or an altimeter restriction bites. Investing in instrument landing systems, approach lighting, and all-weather runway capacity pays operational dividends. This is one reason why purely technological debates about 5G must include investments in infrastructure.

  • Communicate clearly with crews and the flying public. Operational decisions must be explained in plain language to pilots and passengers alike. When a runway is unavailable due to altimeter limitations near 5G sites, that reality should be directly stated so planners and passengers can make informed choices. The DOT consumer protections and investigation into the December 2022 cancellations illustrate the reputational damage from poor customer communication.

Where does that leave us today? Weather will never be engineered away. New communication technologies are not the enemy but they require technical discipline and regulatory foresight to coexist safely with aviation. The reasonable middle ground is straightforward: require the equipment fixes and filters when necessary, maintain conservative operating mitigations while retrofits proceed, and make spectrum deployment conditional on concrete, testable protections for critical avionics. Those are operationally practical steps that preserve safety and reduce needless cancellations when weather and wireless pressures combine.

Regulators and industry will need to continue working in the weeds. As pilots we want predictable, usable options when the ceiling drops and the runway is wet. As a system we should make sure the next tech rollout does not create another avoidable layer of fragility on the days nature already tests us most.