Airlines canceled about 240 flights Wednesday after a 5G reprieve.

Airlines avoided mass flight cancellations on Wednesday morning after an 11th-hour decision by AT&T and Verizon to restrict a new 5G cellular service near airports. As of early afternoon, more than 260 flights had been canceled in the United States, according to FlightAware, an aviation data firm. Just four days earlier, airlines had canceled 470 flights, the best day for flight cancellations in a month. Airlines had warned earlier in the week that the major expansion of 5G service scheduled for Wednesday would disrupt passenger and cargo flights, causing chaos. The companies said the new service could interfere with some radio altimeters, devices that, among other things, determine a plane’s altitude, posing a safety risk especially in bad weather. The so-called C-band frequencies used by 5G are closer to the portion of airwaves used by the altimeters than the frequencies used by earlier generations of cellular service. On Wednesday, the FAA expanded the list of planes and altimeters approved to land in low-visibility conditions at airports where 5G service is deployed. Now, an estimated 62% of the US commercial fleet can land safely under those conditions, the agency said. Even as wireless carriers and federal officials hashed out a compromise on Tuesday, several international airlines said they would cancel or adjust flights to the United States. But many of those companies reinstated flights by Wednesday morning. The 5G expansion had already been delayed twice over aviation safety concerns, first from late December to early January and then again to this week. On Tuesday, the wireless companies relented again and said they would not activate the new service within two miles of some runways, in line with a request from the airline industry. <br/>