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:

• The widespread reliance on GPS for air navigation presents a critical single-point-of-failure risk, as an outage could cripple the entire system due to various potential causes.
• Many modern pilots lack proficiency in traditional VOR navigation due to over-reliance on GPS, making them unprepared for a scenario where GPS is unavailable.
• Pilots must refresh their VOR skills, including tuning and identifying stations, understanding signal characteristics, and executing VOR approaches (which often lack glideslope and may not be runway-aligned), to ensure safety during a GPS outage.

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