GPS: Safety of Flight

If you live west of the Mississippi, out where most of the military airspace and where most of the testing is done, youre well familiar with those pesky NOTAMs announcing interference testing of GPS or outright loss of the GPS signals. Most of us ignore them.

Frank Bowlin

Wednesday, July 05, 2017 at 12:00 AM ET

Verified

Key Takeaways:

Frequent GPS interference testing, particularly in the western U.S., causes widespread outages, creating a significant problem for pilots who have become heavily reliant on GPS navigation.
Ground-based navigation aids are being decommissioned, leading to a "Minimum Operating Network" (MON) designed only for emergencies, which is insufficient for the near-daily, regional GPS disruptions currently occurring.
The FAA's current approach of issuing NOTAMs and expecting pilots to use dwindling ground-based resources is inadequate given the increasing dependence on GPS and the frequency of its disruption.
The article advocates for replacing physical GPS interference testing with computer modeling to prevent outages, lower costs, and ensure a continuously reliable navigation system.

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If you live west of the Mississippi, out where most of the military airspace and where most of the testing is done, you’re well familiar with those pesky NOTAMs announcing interference testing of GPS or outright loss of the GPS signals. Most of us ignore them.

Ignore them, that is, until we actually encounter a loss of reliable GPS navigation. Then we both pay attention to the loss and get pretty upset about it. GPS has become so ubiquitous that many of us simply don’t plan to use anything else. Programming that departure, enroute course, arrival and approach into “the box” is just too easy. Why bother tun‑ ing radios, identifying signals, selecting radials and monitoring for change‑over points? That’s all so last century.