Are the US Military's GPS Tests Threatening Airline Safety? (ieee.org) 119
Long-time Slashdot reader cusco quotes a new report from IEEE Spectrum:
In August 2018, a passenger aircraft in Idaho, flying in smoky conditions, reportedly suffered GPS interference from military tests and was saved from crashing into a mountain only by the last-minute intervention of an air traffic controller. "Loss of life can happen because air traffic control and a flight crew believe their equipment are working as intended, but are in fact leading them into the side of the mountain," wrote the controller. "Had [we] not noticed, that flight crew and the passengers would be dead...."
There are some 90 reports on NASA's Aviation Safety Reporting System forum detailing GPS interference in the United States over the past eight years, the majority of which were filed in 2019 and 2020. Now IEEE Spectrum has new evidence that GPS disruption to commercial aviation is much more common than even the ASRS database suggests. Previously undisclosed Federal Aviation Administration data for a few months in 2017 and 2018 detail hundreds of aircraft losing GPS reception in the vicinity of military tests. On a single day in March 2018, 21 aircraft reported GPS problems to air traffic controllers near Los Angeles. These included a medevac helicopter, several private planes, and a dozen commercial passenger jets. Some managed to keep flying normally; others required help from air traffic controllers. Five aircraft reported making unexpected turns or navigating off course. In all likelihood, there are many hundreds, possibly thousands, of such incidents each year nationwide, each one a potential accident. The vast majority of this disruption can be traced back to the U.S. military, which now routinely jams GPS signals over wide areas on an almost daily basis somewhere in the country.
The military is jamming GPS signals to develop its own defenses against GPS jamming. Ironically, though, the Pentagon's efforts to safeguard its own troops and systems are putting the lives of civilian pilots, passengers, and crew at risk... Todd E. Humphreys, director of the Radionavigation Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin, says. "When something works well 99.99 percent of the time, humans don't do well in being vigilant for that 0.01 percent of the time that it doesn't."
There are some 90 reports on NASA's Aviation Safety Reporting System forum detailing GPS interference in the United States over the past eight years, the majority of which were filed in 2019 and 2020. Now IEEE Spectrum has new evidence that GPS disruption to commercial aviation is much more common than even the ASRS database suggests. Previously undisclosed Federal Aviation Administration data for a few months in 2017 and 2018 detail hundreds of aircraft losing GPS reception in the vicinity of military tests. On a single day in March 2018, 21 aircraft reported GPS problems to air traffic controllers near Los Angeles. These included a medevac helicopter, several private planes, and a dozen commercial passenger jets. Some managed to keep flying normally; others required help from air traffic controllers. Five aircraft reported making unexpected turns or navigating off course. In all likelihood, there are many hundreds, possibly thousands, of such incidents each year nationwide, each one a potential accident. The vast majority of this disruption can be traced back to the U.S. military, which now routinely jams GPS signals over wide areas on an almost daily basis somewhere in the country.
The military is jamming GPS signals to develop its own defenses against GPS jamming. Ironically, though, the Pentagon's efforts to safeguard its own troops and systems are putting the lives of civilian pilots, passengers, and crew at risk... Todd E. Humphreys, director of the Radionavigation Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin, says. "When something works well 99.99 percent of the time, humans don't do well in being vigilant for that 0.01 percent of the time that it doesn't."
Sure, Alanis (Score:1)
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GPS was designed to put nuclear missiles on target.
Re: Sure, Alanis (Score:2)
GPS wasn't designed for safety, it's actually a tactical tool that is and always has been for use by the US military. It is, after all, paid for and maintained by the US military. It only became available for civilian use after the Russians shot down a civilian airliner that inadvertently flew over their territory (though as it turns out, even to this day they'll just shoot down civilian airliners totally at random even outside of their own territory, so GPS hasn't done anything to prevent further occurrenc
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True, but it has since been re-purposed. Civilian service is an official part of the program and it is approved for aviation use.
The military should at LEAST report their experiments to the FAA so pilots can be properly advised.
Remember, everything paid for by the military is ultimately paid for by the taxpayer.
Do we learn? (Score:2)
The premise of the article is based around the idea that humans are somehow unable to adapt given new information. Both planes and GPS have existed for decades which implies the situation is somehow new. As such, in 2018 an "edge case" was discovered where airplanes relying on GPS can be placed in danger. If simpletons rule the world, nothing will be done and no mitigations will be taken. This is just one more issue that has likely already been addressed since it happened.
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This seems to be arguing that pilots (you know, the guy(s) responsible for flying the aircraft) can't be bothered to look out the window(s) while flying.
If your plane's GPS (or any other instrument) fails (whether you know it or not), the pilot is supposed to be able to handle it without flying into a mountain....
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As the last line of TFS point out, ""When something works well 99.99 percent of the time, humans don't do well in being vigilant for that 0.01 percent of the time that it doesn't."
Re:Do we learn? (Score:5, Interesting)
As the last line of TFS point out, ""When something works well 99.99 percent of the time, humans don't do well in being vigilant for that 0.01 percent of the time that it doesn't."
Sure, however this isn't a human bug. The bug is that the GPS on the plane isn't capable of detecting the fact that there is interference. If this same thing was being done by a hostile actor, instead of being random, they would time the maximum effect to happen just as the plane was at most risk of crashing into the mountain and everyone would die.
This is not the military putting people at risk. This is the military accidentally identifying that civilian airliners are putting people at risk by flying with unsafe GPS systems. The solution is that the airliners need to have a navigation system that can detect GPS disruption, possibly by including laser gyroscopes or similar that will detect any change and hold the correct course for long enough to get away from interference or possibly by having directional antennas that will only pick up signals from the satellites.
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Airliners have multiple more or less redundant navigation systems, including gyroscope-based inertial navigation systems. Flight management systems have just gotten a wee bit lazy.
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How about a system that uses best 2 of 3 from a selection of GPS, Galileo (EU), and BeiDou(China)? and lights up/audible warning if the 3rd is suspiciously different.
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Uncle Joe McCarthy and his followers will have you strung up as the Communist you are. Are you sure you want to commit suicide that way?
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A good driver should be able to handle a few slick spots on the road without undue difficulty. From time to time, oil is accidentally spilled on the road and it usually doesn't cause a crash. That doesn't make it OK to deliberately pour oil on a curve in the road.
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This was the army pouring oil on their test track which accidentally got carried by the local birds onto the main road. Now that we know it can happen I'm sure they will be a bit more careful but that doesn't mean it won't happen again accidentally. There's no accusation in the article that the army deliberately set out to make things difficult for commercial pilots, which would be the equivalent of deliberately pouring oil on a curve in the road.
On the other hand, other actors, with suspicion on all of th
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No birds involved, they used a crop duster to spread the oil on a windy day. They need to at least notify the FAA in the future so the hazard can be communicated to pilots flying in the area.
They weren't deliberately attacking commercial aviation, but they were doing something they should have known would likely affect it.
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The bug is that the GPS on the plane isn't capable of detecting the fact that there is interference.
That is not a bug, that is intention. The system is designed that way.
There is no "interference", the receiving side is "misplaced". From the point of view of GPS everything is fine, the plane is just off a few dozen to a few hundred meters.
having directional antennas that will only pick up signals from the satellites.
It is the satellites that give you the wrong informations, and many other means of "course h
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The way most GPS interference systems seem to work is by re-broadcasting parts of the GPS Signal with time delays and at greater power. This article claims that the army is testing such interference. It's not the same as the army's ability to turn down the accuracy or fully encrypt the GPS signal.
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As the last line of TFS point out, ""When something works well 99.99 percent of the time, humans don't do well in being vigilant for that 0.01 percent of the time that it doesn't."
No system should rely on human vigilance. But it shouldn't rely on a single sensor either.
Accelerometers cost about $5. There is one in your cellphone.
So put one in the plane's navigation system and use it for inertial reckoning to cross-check the GPS.
If they differ, report the problem to the pilot.
If you are worried about false positives, then spend another $5 to add a magnetic sensor as well. Then you can do 2-out-of-3 voting. Still report the problem to the pilot, but now the message can be more spec
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A mems accelerometer used as an IMU will have you on the moon about twenty seconds after being synced. Airliners have actual IMUs that work well, plus compasses and several different varieties of radio navigation.
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A mems accelerometer used as an IMU will have you on the moon about twenty seconds after being synced.
Wow. That is impressive. NASA should use them.
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Yeah. They could have done the whole moon landing thing in a studio in Hollywood instead of having to actually go there. Just have an intern run around the room a couple times with the IMU.
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One would be pretty close to useless. There are much more likely to be three, on orthogonal axes, or four on tetrahedral axes (and with built in cross-checking for total field and sensor-failure detection).
The systems which I used to work with would have up to 8 sensors arrayed in an annulus (to fit into the space available), and wired as either two tetrahedra or two orthogonal sets, and could handle up to 3 or 4 sensors failing. But they were de
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That's why we don't let just anybody be a pilot. The pilot's job is 1) recognize and intervene in that one in ten thousand instance when the autopilot can't handle itself and 2) make announcements to keep passengers satisfied that a trained professional is in charge.
There used to be a 3) hit on the stewardesses, but that got cut around when they stopped wearing the little hats.
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I'm not a pilot, but I've flown a little, and have interest in aviation.
Use the instruments they had before GPS?
That's a great idea, except for example LORAN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LORAN [wikipedia.org] was shut off in 2009 by then President Obama. Not sure how useful it would be for short-range precision navigation though. For that there still exists VOR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VHF_omnidirectional_range [wikipedia.org]. But I'm not sure if all planes have a VOR system, and/or if pilots even use it when they have GPS, which is more accurate when it works correct
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Sounds right, thanks. I was thinking of smaller planes, single-engine private Cessnas, Pipers, etc., that often have very few advanced instruments, but often now have GPS.
I used to work for a guy who had a small twin engine. It was years ago- pre-GPS. It had VOR, LORAN, and I don't know what else. Well, certainly the normal altimeter, compass, etc. I don't think it had ILS.
Yes, good point about RF jamming. It might take a lot of focused RF power, but could be done.
I'm not sure if smaller plane avionic
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What exactly do you expect the pilot to do when there is reduced visibility?
It's not the pilot that I expect to change it's the software. Seriously, the software knows the plane's position, altitude, speed, and heading... so why does it no longer know where you are when GPS fails to provide new information?
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so why does it no longer know where you are when GPS fails to provide new information?
Because that is not what is happening?
The deeper you enter the jammed zone, the "more wrong" your GPS information is. That is a gradual process, so the plane does not realise. You forget: this "jamming" is an intrinsic _feature_ of the GPS system, to make it pointless for enemy missiles/planes to rely on it during combat. Military GPS can calculate away the misinformation and is still accurate.
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Sorry, you are completely wrong.
That what you and your parents called "jamming" is obviously not jamming as in "drowning with noise" (that obviously every airplane pilot had noticed).
It is exactly as I told you: it is an intrinsic feature of GPS and was world wide active till mid 1990s ... everything was displaced around 100m, and the displacement changed every few days or even hours.
That is and was intention, and can be activated and deactivated by the military at will. Since the mid 1990s the permanent di
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That is and was intention, and can be activated and deactivated by the military at will. Since the mid 1990s the permanent displacement was deactivated (military GPS has the codes to correct the displacement).
You know what, you're right, they told the sats to send inaccurate timing information and it threw off millions of devices using GPS for a simple exercise and only one plane noticed it.
You absolutely right, I must know nothing. 2 + 2 = 5.
Tool sharing hiccups (Score:1)
GPS was built for and funded by the military. It happens to also be useful for civilian purposes, but perhaps its time to clarify responsibilities and budgets. If the military has to spend extra to cater to civilian uses, then they legitimately could ask for reimbursement.
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No, they overpay when contractors charge too much.
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This screws up telescopes at observatories (Score:4, Informative)
I remember reading about a similar jamming test conducted off the coast of San Diego that fritzed the automatic teller machine network for a few hours, among other things. Makes you wonder what it would do with autonomous vehicles, wouldn't be good!
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Wouldn't it be possible to add in Glonass and Galileo as supplemental data points and to detect the GPS drift/jamming? Yes this would take some work and be a retrofit, but vs the $1000/hr cost you list it seems like the cost-benefits of such a move would be more than worth it.
Re:This screws up telescopes at observatories (Score:4, Informative)
What's really fun is that almost all the world's electrical grids have standardized on using the GPS satellite clocks for synchronizing the phase between the various parts of the AC power grid. If one segment gets an invalid signal, or goes without a signal for long enough, expensive stuff blows up. Hasn't happened yet, but the likelihood is that it will eventually if the military keeps fooling around with it.
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Indeed. Fortunately most terrorists are morons (which is why they're terrorists, of course), but I'm not looking forward to the day that extortionists figure this out.
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Oh, I've been pointing out for years that the US electrical grid could be taken down by a dozen guys with second hand deer rifles, and it hasn't happened yet. Nor has the grid been noticeably hardened against the possibility. I guess neither terrorists nor corporate executives tend to pay much attention to the web sites that I post in.
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If you're wanting to do it on the cheap, get some military surplus rifles. My SMLE cost a damn sight less than a secondhand deer rifle, and is just as accurate
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Accuracy wouldn't be the intent with a deer rifle, it anonymity when purchasing and penetration power. You can walk up to the fence of most substations, even the really large ones rarely have guards, then you want to be able to punch through the metal shell of the large transformers and relay cabinets. I've never paid much attention to the Lee Enfields, never having had any interest in bold action rifles, but I've seen substation transformers taken out by a .30-.30 or a 30.06.
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Think of SMLE ammo as comparable to .30-06. So if a .30-30 can do it, an SMLE can do it better. Personally, I rate the Lee-Enfield a hair behind the .30-06, though I suspect any Brit would swap the two in the previous sentence....;-p
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A forum for GPS specialists:
https://www.gpsworld.com/wirel... [gpsworld.com]
The IEEE. In this case the writers are proposing a system to protect against GPS spoofing, which still is not being widely deployed.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/ener... [ieee.org]
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Maybe the terriers are not what we're being told. There are dozens of easy targets just in the Puget Sound area, tunnels, ferries, floating bridges, substations, railroad trestles, no special training or suicide bombers needed. And yet nothing happens.
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Re: This screws up telescopes at observatories (Score:2)
Odd. When they bring a generator online, making sure it's on the correct phase is critical to preventing damage to the generator. But once the generator is online, it maintains matching phase automatically. In fact, it's impossible to get out of phase. Attempt to spin the generator faster and if you're successful, you cause *all* the generators to spin faster. Attempt to slow the generator down, and you slow *all* the generators down. There's one hell of a lot of stored energy in the form of angular momentu
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What's really fun is that almost all the world's electrical grids have standardized on using the GPS satellite clocks for synchronizing the phase between the various parts of the AC power grid.
No, they have not. How do you come to that utterly stupid idea?
If one segment gets an invalid signal, or goes without a signal for long enough, expensive stuff blows up. Hasn't happened yet, but the likelihood is that it will eventually if the military keeps fooling around with it.
Of course it has not happened yet. Be
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How do you come to that utterly stupid idea?
Because it's been under discussion on the IEEE web site for the last decade, and I used to contract for a local electrical utility and spent quite a bit of time talking to the power engineers. I've seen videos of what happens when interties get out of synch, it's impressive. There have been multiple solutions proposed to the issue of GPS spoofing, but to my knowledge none have been widely implemented.
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Then you failed for some bollocks. There is no real central time concept at all. The grid is synched by keeping it _stable_ and not by keeping it at "reference of an external time keeping device".
There are countries, e.g. like the USA, that have strange laws like this: if over a period of time (no how long, but it is weeks or months even) the grid is "losing" or "gaining" time, as in having continuously a to low frequency or to high one, then this needs to be compensated to intentionally run the grid at a d
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Hmmm. While I've no reason to doubt that GPS is used as a tool for getting an accurate time, let's work the numbers.
Let's say that your GPS-fiddling is intended to move the target system from mid-air by half a kilometre to mid-mountain.
0.5km at speed of light is 1/600,000the of a second - 1.67 nanoseconds.
Power gri
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They're not using GPS at the generation station, but at the interties where pieces of the grid touch each other. The different sections of the grid have to synchronize the AC sine wave, and if not synchronized bad things happen. I saw video of some piece of equipment, a relay station I believe, exploding gloriously in a test.
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You're still looking at mismatches in the order of percent at worst (I recall - one of the early attempts to measure the speed of light involved rotating gears at "turbine-ish" speeds, and flight paths of the order of a km, so I think I've got about the right order of magnitude).
I've seen that sort of safe
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Re: This screws up telescopes at observatories (Score:2)
Then use an onsite atomic clock to bridge any GPS outages and stop cheap skating. You known that chip scale atomic clocks cost only a couple of hours of lost data collection.
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There are two major telescopes there, a 3.5 mete
3.69 microseconds (Score:2)
The way multiple phones are able to use the same tower is that they take turns. Your phone's turn lasts 3.69 microseconds. Meaning that if the timing is 2 microseconds off, things don't work. Because phones might not have a good GPS signal all the time, the protocol says it is the tower's responsibility to know what time it is - to within a millionth of a second.
GPS provides that highly accurate clock.
Because radio signals travel 10 meters in 30 nanoseconds, a GOS receiver needs to be precise within sever
Why can't testing be in a scheduled window? (Score:3)
Something like all testing is done on Wednesdays from 2am-8am ET.
And GPS is not the only positioning system. How hard would it be for the positioning systems to use the 4 positioning systems?
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VOR, DME, NDB; But can they still read a map? (Score:2)
All sizeable aircraft have tools to monitor the large network of ground based positioning systems, and they run at VHF (or HF!).
There is also good old dead reckoning. If the wind is known that can be fairly accurate. And the heavies have inertial navigation.
The only issue is whether modern pilots know how to actually use that stuff that they have not touched since they passed some exam long ago.
It could be a bit like a teenager trying navigate a car without a mobile phone using one of those things they ha
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Depends how you define "hard".
Using different satellite constellations obviously is simple. Upgrading the current planes is not. Most planes run decades old _approved_ systems. To upgrade you would need a new system, approve that one, and approve it for each plane. And finally make the (also financial) decision to actually do the upgrade.
IFR with single source nav? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'm thinking the same. Flying IFR with no back-up and complete reliance on GPS seems like taking on too much risk. Likewise, if you lose GPS, the PIC needs to be able to remember how to fly using the back-up system.
Re:IFR with single source nav? (Score:5, Informative)
Is using GPS as your sole source of navigation data under IFR in line with FAA regs these days?
The FAA is currently in the middle of transitioning the entire US navigation system into an ADS-B based on. ADS-B location data is based upon reliable GPS data. So while an IFR rated pilot should be able to fly a single aircraft in IMC or VMC conditions sans GPS, if the overall ATC system is dependent on GPS and GPS disappears because of jamming (for what ever reason), then you have a huge issue with safely co-ordinating large numbers of aircraft.
In addition the FAA is also slowly shutting down radio based nav aids, thus exacerbating the issues if GPS data is jammed/wrong.
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If the jamming merely offsets GPS locations by some fixed amount (probably), the ADS-B still works to keep aircraft separated from each other - they may not be where they think they are, but all nearby aircraft are equally affected so separation is maintained. (Of course this doesn't prevent them from hitting terrain or obstacles.)
That’s all fine, but do you want to base passenger aircraft safety on the assumption that the GPS jamming only offsets location?
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do you want to base passenger aircraft safety on the assumption that the GPS jamming only offsets location?
No, but what year is it? Why don't aircraft by now have a collision avoidance system that uses an inertial tracker and a detailed terrain map to let pilots know when they are in danger of controlled flight into the ground? Backed up by terrain radar? Not a ground following system, just a ground-detecting system? All of this might be too expensive for private pilots, but it seems like it would be a minor line item compared to the price of a plane.
Then again, I have this reaction to things I encounter all the
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Is using GPS as your sole source of navigation data under IFR in line with FAA regs these days? It didn't used to be but I haven't checked in quite a few years. Back in the old days I was trained to cross check at least two sources of data, and a third if I could get it, I don't know if that is still standard procedure. I know that some of the more sophisticated navigation equipment used today has integrity monitors that check for inconsistent data between different external sources and some even against an internal solution (poor man's INS). Of course if the external solution drifts slowly the system is likely to just re-sync the internal model to the bad external data, but it does catch relatively quick changes.
I used to work on software used for aviation (not FAA certified - it was just training systems but it was supposed to emulate the exact software in the aircraft). You can certainly use inertial navigation in fixed wing aircraft (the military required it last time I was working for the DoD) but inertial navigation is very difficult for a helicopter. In fact I don't remember having to support it for the simulated systems. I could misremember, but it is much easier to cope with these problems in fixed wing
People's Brains Are Turning to Mush (Score:1)
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Air space is busy and there are thousands of planes in the skies at any given time. Having one or several go off course at the wrong time could be catastrophic.
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Correlate? (Altimeters, Gyros, GPS, Pitots, Maps) (Score:1)
I mean I don't say we should equip each Aircraft with a celestial navigator
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
But can't we have the flight computers correlate all available data into a "sanity check" and perhaps give a warning, like "Navigational Systems Implausibility"
An well planes often fly above the clouds giving them good sight on the night sky and perhaps intent for aerospace instrumentation manufacturers to produce an automatic celestial position checker.
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I think that the 737 MAX has abundantly demonstrated already that they're not competent to do anything like that any longer.
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It was executive greed, rather than laziness. Boeing used to have a programming staff which was top of the line, some of the best in the industry. Unfortunately people like that are expensive to keep around, they were laid off, team by team. after the introduction of the 777 and replaced with lower paid and less competent staff and teams of foreign contractors.
The decision to not produce a new airplane and instead remodel the 737 was made at the executive level as well. Designing, producing and certifying
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The 777 nominally took six years from initial meetings with customers to the first deliveries, but work had been happening for at least a couple of years earlier since the need for a new aircraft was obvious (per a Boeing engineer whose wife I worked with). The 787 program started in 2004 and first delivery was 2011.
Yeah, we'll probably continue to disagree.
Redundancy? (Score:2)
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A $400 cell phone supports 4 different GNSS systems (GPS, GLONASS, BeiDou, Galileo). Certainly a life critical system could do the same and report if there were significant disagreement.
Do the four systems you list all use significantly different radio frequencies or are they all susceptible to the same jamming? I get that the technique for spoofing them is probably different, but is jamming any different?
Re: Redundancy? (Score:1)
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TFA says that they're different frequencies. GPS is the only system that has worldwide 24/7 coverage, the others get away with using fewer satellites by concentrating their coverage over their home territory and not caring as much about the rest of the world.
Re: Redundancy? (Score:3, Informative)
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They have now? It's quite likely my information is outdated then.
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$40,000 devices are different from $400 ones (Score:2)
The aircraft navigation systems all have to be certified, which takes a long time. So while your $400 phone might use 4 systems, I doubt if the $40,000 aircraft system does.
They do have VOR, DME, NDBs etc. If they can remember how to use them.
Re: Redundancy? (Score:1)
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Perhaps you're not clear on the concept - it's not to have redundant location fixes, it's to have redundant systems which can be correlated in order to detect and report failures. The problem happens when the GPS seems to be working, but isn't accu
No, it's not. (Score:1)
#1 job of a pilot is to fly the plane (Score:5, Insightful)
Aboard my boat, I have three GPS units which can accept GPS and GLONASS satellite signals (the Russian version of GPS). Newer equipment should also accept Galileo satellite signals (the EU version), and I've seen some equipment also able to accept Beidou (the Chinese version). I also have a compass, and a phone set to dead-reckon our position based on accelerometer data. In the old days you also had LORAN as a backup - radio signals from shore antennas. That got shut down over much protestation, but I've seen equipment offering much the same service using radio broadcasts from other sources. Some long-distance sailors I know also carry the traditional sextant on board. If you get lost and heaven forbid crash or wreck due to the loss of only a single navigation source, that's your own damn fault for not preparing enough and building in enough redundancy. Flying and boating are not like driving, where you can just pull over to the side of the road if something goes wrong and wait for roadside assistance. If your plane or boat gets lost, it's extremely unlikely anyone will be able to find you without you communicating with them. So it's imperative that you have enough equipment to always know where you are, and don't get lost due to a single or even double or triple failure.
The military messing with GPS may be an inconvenience. But it's the user's responsibility to assure that they're able to cope with the loss of any single navigation source, whether that be due to equipment failure, natural phenomenon like weather, failure of GPS, or the military just messing with it. The whole point of having these multiple redundant systems is that you can take one down for testing or maintenance, without adversely affecting traffic. And like GPS itself (which started off as military-only), I expect anything the military learns about hardening GPS against these types of spoofing attacks will eventually make it into civilian receivers, further improving their reliability.
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Redundancy is expensive, as I'm sure you've observed in your own setup. Airline corporations don't spend a penny more than they have to on passenger safety, it doesn't make them any money and they have to pay insurance anyway. Boeing has recently demonstrated that they no longer know how to accept multiple inputs into their control systems as well.
Reliability Testing Anyone? (Score:1)
Use 4 systems, vote, and indicate nav problems (Score:2)
Why we still need terrestrial navaids (Score:3)
Betteridge has you covered (Score:1)
Hint: No.
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My original title was 'US Military's GPS Tests a Major Threat to Airline Safety'.
Jamming or feeding false data? (Score:2)
"Loss of life can happen because air traffic control and a flight crew believe their *equipment are working as intended*, but are in fact leading them into the side of the mountain,"
So wait a minute. If the signal is just being jammed, the GPS equipment should just flash a warning that it can't aquire a valid signal. But it sounds like the military is feeding false data to these affected areas.
This is a very serious and criminal matter.