Admiral Grace Hopper was an amazing person, well known for her contribution to modern computing. Less well known than her famous nanoseconds (look it up), she was fond of saying that “because we’ve always done it that way” was never a valid reason for anything. I’ve long tried to head that guidance.
Last month, our article “Are You Ready for MON?” described the FAA’s plans to get around in a persistent GPS failure. The National Airspace System is retiring a lot of VORs, but will retain some critical VORs and ground-based instrument approaches—the Minimum Operating Network—with the idea that without GPS we’ll still be able to navigate to one of those MON airports (not necessarily where we’re going) and fly a VOR, LOC, or ILS approach.
