It’ll take avionics that log the approach or a combo of reported on air malfunction and a ground track, which the latter won’t be conclusive — but it’ll take off a portion of the automatic “pilot error”.
Meanwhile most other pilots will mostly go missed and if it persists, to their alternate.
In other words the real accident rate will be so low, they’ll need a miracle to make the correlation.
It'll depend on the receiver and location. FAA flight check aircraft may or may not be able to tell - if they do, the approach will be NOTAMed OTS. There is equipment available that can test in the field. Unlike the VHF NAV band, where one could often hear the FM stations interned products that interfered with the system, this will be harder for the average user to detect. For GA (but not air carrier), the FAA seems more amenable to external filters in the receiving system - they have been used in some GNS-430 (and 430W) installations to reduce LO interference from the receiver getting back into the GPS system.
It is scary to see how a little (OK, a lot in this case) lobbying money can outweigh the very reasonable cautioning and concern over the reliable working of GPS, which much of the population depends on in their everyday lives. I have a very hard time seeing this as anything other than bribing decision makers to benefit a business at the cost of the general public.
If it was only aviation users who will be affected, then I'd still be upset as a pilot who has invested a lot of money into my airplane and its equipment, but I can see the need for a reasonable discussion about what makes the most sense in the long run and in the big picture, given how small aviation is (relatively speaking). I'm not saying the outcome of that discussion is clear from the start, but I can see a need for analysis and debate.
But this case with Legato, it couldn't be clearer. Everyone uses GPS; many depend on it for convenience or efficiency, and some (like us) bet our lives on it when we fly RNAV approaches. This simply cannot go forward. The needs of so many should not be thrown out the window.
Sorry, let me step off my soap box now. But I'm really worried where this may take us.
- Martin
A lot of politics at work. From the Fed perspective, there's a push for more competition in the wireless data sector, especially right now, and a push for more spectrum for data capacity. There's also the fact that the government makes a lot of money from spectrum auction and fees - spectrum that must lie fallow doesn't produce revenue. The FCC has steadily taken spectrum from other services (or forced spectrum efficiency measures in other services) to auction the spectrum to the wireless companies. That's why you periodically have to rescan your over-the-air HDTV receiver and why many state/local governments and other land mobile users have had to replace equipment with narrower-band transmission equipment.
When you look at it, the government - and the military - still have vast portions of spectrum reserved and that coordination is done by a different agency (IRAC, which is part of NTIA, which is part of Commerce). So the FCC does non-federal allocations and IRAC does Federal allocations. And all of it has to meet internationally-agreed spectrum map for allocations. Some of that harks back to the days where interoperability & compatibility were important. Less so now.
On the positive side, I've seen the FCC's field and enforcement bureau take a more aggressive stance against potential interfering transmitters than they did before. They've told various companies to "fix the interference or shut down" when it comes to protecting services deemed to be of higher priority - so safety-of-life stuff is at the top of the list, with wireless services somewhere in the middle. It will be quite interesting to see if the FCC maintains that stand against Ligado's stuff vs GPS or not. Certainly "wiping out" GPS may cause major disruption given that it's used to attain (more) precise timing within the existing 4G/5G networks, banking systems, computer & network systems, stock-trading systems, as well as the navigation systems we all know and (mostly) love. WAAS should make the aviation system more robust, though not for non-WAAS receivers.
So it remains to be seen just how this will roll out. And who will end up buying Legato's system. Will it be Verizon? T-Mobile? ATT? Dish? or one of the cable companies?
This is all presuming that 5G gets built in the face of the purported link to Covid-19.
