this post was submitted on 01 May 2024
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This sounds legitimately annoying... But why is this canceling flights? Do the pilots not carry maps? Plus, they're in the air, can't they rely on radar guidance? They may have radar on the aircraft, but there's definitely ground based radar as well.
Pilots are very well trained, they should be able to handle this... What did pilots do in 1970, before gps existed?
Not an expert, but given the high numbers of planes simultaneously in the air, it's critical to know high precision position data and not estimated numbers based on maps and manual triangulation with a calculator. That might have been viable decades ago, but the tightly scheduled flights nowadays operate with minimal intervals between the flights. Even if pilots still master the old craft of navigation, it is simply not practical in an overcrowded sky, where minimization of risks is paramount.
Pretty much this, yes.
There’s also the complexity of approach procedures that they need to follow in order to mitigate noise complaints. Back in the old days, they’d just fly from radio beacon to radio beacon, with look-out-the-window navigation for the final approach.
These days, lots of airports are within or close to cities, which means a much more complex routing and specific altitude and speed restrictions. GPS made that possible; they’re simply too much workload for pilots.
So yeah, in emergency situations where GPS fails completely, there’s going to be some changes to procedures needed in order to make that work. They’d also need to increase separation between planes in order to prevent problems.
The simple solution is: nobody should fuck around with GPS since we literally all benefit from it.
The problem being that GPS is American and thus has political and military "features". Maybe Galileo will step up as i see GLONASS and Beidou suffering from the same issues.
The article is not really specific to GPS, and the other systems have the same susceptibility to attack
They are cancelling flights because those specific airports don't have the equipment to provide a precision landing (ILS) during low visibility weather. They only published a landing procedure with GPS. They will now spend a few months installing the ILS system to enable such landings so they can resume commercial flights.
Before GPS, all airports would be either VFR only or would have an ILS system installed. Since then, some airports were built without an expensive ILS but used a published GPS approach to allow low-vis landings.
They could have continued flights with only VFR navigation, but that would seriously restrict the weather they could operate in.
There was a civilian airplane that mistakenly drifted into Soviet airspace and was shot down back in the 1983, killing everyone on board. Pilots can train for scenarios requiring manual operation, but that doesn't mean they should only rely on human perception, especially when it involves other people's lives.