The Day The Waypoints Died

Imagine you’re cruising high above an undercast, in smooth, clear skies. The GPS in your panel shows you making good time, with about an hour remaining to your destination. The Center frequency has been fairly quiet; you know there are a lot of other IFR airplanes out there, but everyone is settled into cruise so all you hear are the handoffs to the next sector or approach facility, or the occasional clearance for an approach into a rural airport. Then, without warning, your GPS advises it’s lost a usable signal. The magenta line by which you’ve been navigating direct to your destination airport disappears and you have no more groundspeed or position information. Everything else seems normal—it’s not an electrical failure, at least not to the airplane’s entire system—but you no longer have GPS navigation.

Key Takeaways:

• Modern aviation's heavy reliance on GPS creates a significant single-point failure vulnerability, as a widespread outage could be caused by various factors like solar activity, terrorism, or technical flaws.
• Many pilots, particularly newer generations, have diminished proficiency in traditional VOR (VHF Omni-directional Range) navigation skills, including en route flying, signal identification, and non-precision approaches.
• In the event of a GPS failure, pilots must be prepared to revert to ground-based VOR navigation techniques, including understanding VOR theory, tuning and identifying stations, dealing with signal characteristics, and executing VOR approaches without glideslope or GPS-derived distance information.

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