America's GPS Problem

Perhaps we should have kept more of the old technologies around?

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/23/...tives-navigation-critical-infrastructure.html

 

Paywall or sign in to social media. Do you have a TL;DR summary?

 

Nothing new. GPS can be jammed or spoofed, and the satellites are vulnerable to acts of nature like solar flares and the ill intents of nations with spacefaring capabilities.

 

Yep. Not worried. No more of a threat than it has been for 30 years.

 

A crosscheck scheme using the old LORAN system would eliminate spoofing. Fiddling with that 100 KHZ signal would require a huge antennae - not anything portable.

 

Long live the VOR!

 

NDB FTW

 

4 Course FTW

 

Yellow Arrows FTW

 

Reading water towers is pretty solid

 

Bah you win...

wait..
Sextant FTW?

 

Henges FTW!

 

Dah! Ed wins!

I have to look back at my Airplane Flying Handbook from 2500BC to remember how to use them for navigation. But I think I need to upgrade my 430 to be able to use them, it is so ancient...

 

Loadstone floating in a pail of water. Least you fly off the edge of the earth into the clutches of the waiting sea monsters ....

 

as more and more of our daily lives use/depend on GPS, it becomes more attractive to jam/disrupt reception of GPS signals.

 

Local jamming is easy though and if targeted to disrupt a specific need by someone there, very effective. It doesn't have to be widespread.


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A's and N's FTW!

 

IMHO the chance than a VOR or ILS will be out when you need it is hundreds of times more likely than bad guys or black fed gov ops taking out GPS.

 

We, meaning the government, purposefully jams GPS all the time out west here. Monthly warnings from all the usual test areas covering most of my State.

It's technically an outage and happens waaay more often than VOR outages.

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Nothing wrong with a DF steer, the only flight service station that still has one that I have come across was in Talkeena Alaska, and that was back in 09. When I enquired about it no one know how to use it. Back in the UK we used to request a QDM best I remember.

 

Bonfires FTW
http://www.dreamsmithphotos.com/arrow/airmail_routes/transcontinental/1921/1921_sf_ny.html

 

Interesting article, Peter. Thank you for the link.

I am in the group who thinks we do need a backup. Not sure what it should be, but LORAN was great I thought.

 

I agree with Nauga in that if we experience widespread outages, we’re probably in a wartime situation and it really won’t matter on the civ side of things. We’ll have more important things to worry about than air travel being disrupted. Military side of the house trains to these navigation denials on a regular basis. That’s why they have INS backups.

 

Sure. The last sentence of the article:

The fear is that debate and deliberation will continue, when time is running out.

It's alarmist claptrap, which the public gobbles like pigs at a trough.

 

I flew guns for 20 years AH-1s and AH-64s with a single NDB for IFR...bring it on...hopefully there’s also some radar for a PAR as well...I remember when GPS was only for the Artillery in the Army...

 

NDB? That’s advanced stuff right there. Not available in I Corps in 1970.

How about clock, RMI, and altimeter —your fundamentals for enroute work in the clouds: Vietnam Flight Rules (VFR).

 

Analogous in a way to never using an electronic flight calculator instead of the cardboard E6B, because you might run out of batteries. Or relying on radios, because they might break - just fly with your eyes.

 

I am pretty sure that I can live without gps, in fact I would prefer it.

 

You have just greatly upset he disciples of the magenta line. Surely someone will be along shortly to scold you and tell you how barbaric and backward you are

 

A single event could wreck every GPS approach within your fuel range or even further. If you come upon an ILS outage chances are you can go find another one close by to get you safely on the ground

 

kind of hard to predict the failure rate caused by deliberate actions. And I don't believe that it's a valid comparison (random failure rate of a specific VOR vs the non-random failure due to deliberate sabotage)

 

Why would you prefer to live without it? Not arguing - everyone has their own preferences, and those are yours and yours alone. But I am not sure I have every heard anyone say they would prefer not to have GPS in their life. So maybe just a question borne out of curiosity.

 

GLONASS. If it’s down at the same time as GPS, we’re in a war and have much bigger problems than private aviation.

 

I’m over “CLASS OF 2020” at 2500 feet.

 

GLONASS has been spotty for a good while now when you're trying to use it for high accuracy differential processing. Since before Thanksgiving.

 

I'm not spreading FUD. Try finding a day here where we aren't under a so-called "cooperative" NOTAM.

It's only cooperative in more densely populated areas where the service is seemed more critical and isn't a "fly over State".

Now is it causing in-flight probkrms? Usually not.

But if you chose to fly whenever there wasn't a jamming NOTAM up around here, you wouldn't fly very often.

Fully aware it is more difficult to bother aircraft than other users. Re-read my post and you'll notice it said nothing about aircraft being the possible (and easy) target of specific user jamming for a nefarious purpose.

Diversity in navaids is never a bad thing. Especially when you live in the "constant jamming zones". The NOTAMs have hit my inbox for years now like clockwork every month.

Lots of folls here have no idea such constant waemjngs of jamming by our own entities even is a "thing". That's the only reason I mentioned it. Not FUD. Reality here.

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Night, on top, and celestial.