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 contends that relying solely on GPS for general aviation navigation is ill-advised due to frequent and widespread government-induced interference and outages.
While current GPS outages are often mitigated by switching to VORs, the FAA's plan to decommission most VORs for a GPS-centric system will make future outages a severe and unmanageable navigation problem.
The article calls for the FAA to address the issue of frequent planned GPS interference and provide substantive solutions before fully committing to a GPS-dependent National Airspace 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.