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, especially in the western U.S., causes significant navigation disruptions, despite pilots' increasing reliance on GPS and the ongoing decommissioning of ground-based navigation aids.
The FAA's current strategy, which involves issuing NOTAMs and relying on a minimal emergency-only network of traditional navaids, is insufficient to address these near-daily regional GPS outages.
The author argues that agencies conducting GPS interference tests should switch to computer modeling instead of real-world disruptions to prevent outages, save costs, and maintain a consistently reliable navigation system.

See a mistake? Contact us.

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.