The recent United Airlines shutdown of Starlink Wi-Fi on its regional jets—prompted by pilots’ reports of static and interference on air traffic control (ATC) radios—has set off alarm bells in aviation safety circles. But beneath the headlines, a deeper and far more consequential issue lurks: the unintentional leakage of low-frequency electromagnetic noise from high-frequency satellite antennas isn’t just a problem for cockpit radios. It’s a problem for public health, rooted in physics and confirmed by a fast-growing body of biological research. And at the heart of it all is a regulatory regime so out-of-date, and so captured by industry, that it may well be the greatest environmental failure of our time.
Why Starlink Can Disrupt Air Traffic Control—And Why That’s a Canary for Human Biology
Starlink’s hardware operates in the Ku and Ka microwave bands—roughly 12–30 GHz—beaming gigabit internet from space to pizza-box antennas mounted on aircraft fuselages. In theory, these frequencies are far above the 118–137 MHz VHF band used by ATC voice communications. Yet, in practice, the real world is far messier than a lab-bench spectrum analyzer. Pilots on United jets heard bursts of static and hiss on their ATC radios. Radio astronomers, too, have measured Starlink satellites leaking energy far below their licensed bands, with signals detected between 54 and 66 MHz—decades-old spectrum territory that was never meant to host digital noise from orbit.
How does this happen? The answer lies not in the primary “carrier wave” used for data, but in the complex interplay of high-speed digital electronics, switching power supplies, and the phased-array antennas themselves. Every clock, every data burst, every power transistor generates not just a clean tone at its assigned frequency, but a cascade of harmonics, intermodulation products, and amplitude fluctuations that spill down across the spectrum—some of them landing squarely in the frequencies where even a few microvolts can disrupt radio reception or, as emerging research now shows, living cells.
The Physics of Interference: From Air-Band to Ion Channel
Amplitude modulation (AM) is notoriously susceptible to interference, because any fluctuation in the electromagnetic field’s amplitude is “heard” as hiss or crackle. ATC radios are designed to detect weak, narrowband AM signals; even the smallest intrusion—whether a steady tone or a burst of broadband digital “hash”—can open the squelch and pollute the channel. This is not just a nuisance: in flight, clean communications are a matter of life and death.
But the deeper danger is that the very same amplitude fluctuations that break through an air-band radio’s defenses are precisely the class of signals that bioelectromagnetic research identifies as most bioactive. The science is clear: living cells, especially neurons and excitable tissues like heart and muscle, rely on voltage-gated ion channels whose natural operation can be disrupted by oscillating electromagnetic fields, particularly in the extremely low frequency (ELF) and very high frequency (VHF) ranges. It’s the coherence, the polarization, and—crucially—the amplitude modulation (the “envelope,” not the “carrier”) that drives biological effects.
A 2025 review by Panagopoulos and colleagues lays out the evidence: forced oscillation of ions by amplitude-modulated electromagnetic fields can trigger oxidative stress, DNA breaks, and calcium overload in cells, even at intensities far below those needed to heat tissue. It’s not thermal; it’s informational—the same “hiss” that a pilot hears as interference is a physical agent that a cell experiences as a disruption of its most fundamental signaling.
Regulatory Failure: The FCC’s Lawsuit Loss and a Wild West in the Sky
Despite the mounting evidence, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) continues to regulate radiofrequency (RF) emissions using a playbook written decades ago, based on the premise that only thermal (heating) effects matter. Power is averaged over time, frequency bands are considered in isolation, and non-thermal, modulated effects are hand-waved away as “unproven.” The result is a system where a device that passes a lab-based emission test can, in practice, pour bioactive noise into the environment—undetected, unregulated, and unaccountable.
This isn’t just academic. In 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that the FCC had acted “arbitrarily and capriciously” by ignoring evidence of non-thermal biological effects when updating its RF safety guidelines. The court ordered the FCC to explain why it was discounting hundreds of peer-reviewed studies showing oxidative stress, DNA damage, and other harms at exposure levels well below current limits. The agency has yet to respond with credible science. In effect, the United States is flying blind, with public health riding shotgun on an unregulated, industry-dominated experiment.
The Bioelectromagnetic Blind Spot: Why ATC Interference Signals a Larger Crisis
If Starlink’s phased-array emissions are capable of interfering with narrowband ATC radios—equipment designed to reject everything but the intended signal—they are more than capable of interfering with the exquisitely sensitive electrical systems of the human body. The ion channels in your brain, your heart, your developing embryo, and your endocrine glands operate in the millivolt and even microvolt range, and are triggered by changes in membrane potential orders of magnitude smaller than the voltage needed to crackle in a pilot’s headset.
The reason this matters cannot be overstated. The same frequencies and amplitude-modulated signals that ATC radios struggle to filter out are—according to the latest biophysical research—at the heart of what makes wireless radiation a unique and insidious biological risk. It is not the “heat” of the signal, but the informational content: the peaks, the pulses, the coherence, the variability, and the harmonics that interact with living systems at their most vulnerable points.
An Uncomfortable Truth: We Are All Unwitting Test Subjects
The Starlink-United incident is more than an engineering glitch. It is a warning shot—a real-world demonstration that emissions far outside the licensed bands can, and do, create havoc in the most critical systems. It is proof that our regulatory standards are unfit for the complexity and sensitivity of both our technology and our biology. And it is a stark reminder that, in the absence of updated, science-based standards, we are conducting a global, involuntary experiment on the nervous systems, fertility, and genomes of every living creature exposed to this ever-expanding wireless mesh.
What’s needed is not a panicked retreat from progress, but a scientifically honest reckoning. We must require comprehensive in-situ measurements—not just of carrier power, but of all sidebands, harmonics, and amplitude fluctuations, down to ELF and VHF. We must apply the latest biophysical models of voltage-gated ion channel disruption, not just the obsolete thermal paradigm. And above all, we must recognize that the first signs of trouble—whether heard in the cockpit or measured in a petri dish—demand precaution, not denial.
Because when the static from our satellites can break through the cockpit, it’s already breaking through the body. The question is, how much longer will we ignore the signal?