Our Intermittent GPS Future

Various government agencies think its necessary to potentially render GPS useless throughout hundreds of square miles of the NAS nearly every single day. We who live in the West have experienced this for years. From my home in Santa Fe, NM, I get at least one, sometimes a few, notices of nearby GPS outages every week. But, more recently, those of you in the East have begun to feel more of the same pain.

Editorial Staff

Saturday, April 13, 2019 at 12:00 AM ET

Verified

Key Takeaways:

The author strongly opposes relying solely on GPS for general aviation navigation due to frequent, government-induced GPS interference and outages.
The FAA's plan to transition to a GPS-centric airspace system and decommission most VORs will eliminate critical backup navigation, making GPS outages a significant safety and practicality issue.
The article calls for the FAA to address the problem of frequent GPS interference or discuss plans to curtail them before fully committing to a GPS-only navigation system.

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Discussions about the veracity of GPS as a sole-source navigation mechanism for the future have intensified. I’ve written about this before and my views haven’t changed, but let me express them a bit more stridently.

Until and unless various official agencies, led by the military, find some alternative to widespread GPS interference, GPS as the primary means of general-aviation navigation is a singularly bad idea. No, I’m not one who laments the loss of VHF-nav skills. My objection lies solely with GPS practicality.