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Civilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking

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Re: Civilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking

#191

Post by VBprogrammer »

ifwinterco wrote: post #182
VBprogrammer wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> GPS is not essential to air navigation. It’s nice to have, and there are some approaches that legally require it to be operational in order to fly them (IFR procedures) but aviation has other systems in place to guide aircraft under conditions where visual flight navigation is impossible. This has not been the practical reality for many years for IFR flights (arguably not for VFR flight either but some of the good…

This approach is wrong though, as we’re now seeing. GPS is comically easy to jam or spoof and assuming it will work all the time is just a silly, dangerous assumption. We just happened to live through a brief period where you could believe that

Yeah, I agree that GPS is too easy to jam and should ideally not be used exclusively but if you are flying anything from a newish C172 to a Cessna Citation (or any other non-long haul business jet) it is the reality.

Annoyingly all of these systems have VOR and DME equipment, it would be trivial to have a back up position to well within en-route navigation accuracy limits and certainly close enough to prevent this kind of accident. But regulation and certification requirements being what they are they are no one does it.

In an ideal world we'd have some kind of INS but the ring laser gyros and accelerometers required are stubbornly expensive.

Re: Civilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking

#192

Post by wk_end »

AdamN wrote: post #82
lbriner wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was the partial cause of Air France 447. Pilots were so used to "the plane won't make a mistake" that they were not aware/not trained properly about things that are nothing to do with the FMS like frozen pitot tubes and also that the autopilot has a number of "modes" which mean you need to go back to basics like altitude, attitude and air speed.

They didn't know their air speed (because of the pitot tubes being frozen). I think the report says that there was a path to safety if they had kept focused but it wasn't as easy as just flying the plane via 'the basics'.

I don't know what the definitions of "basic" is, but even PPL students are trained to recognize the effects of a frozen pitot tube.

Re: Civilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking

#193

Post by jjwiseman »

CodeWriter23 wrote: post #189
jjwiseman wrote: post #179

I run GPSJAM.org, have been studying and tracking the effects of GPS interference on aviation for the past 5 years, and I was a source for this article. I'm not a pilot and I don't work for any aviation agency. I'm very curious to see what the final NTSB report says, but their preliminary report along with commentary from other analysts seems to show that this was a crew that made bad choices and died because of it.…

Interesting how neither you nor the article affirm or deny if they plane was flying in restricted airspace either before or during the crash.

It's not interesting: they were not in restricted airspace at any point during the flight. If they were, probably the NTSB, a YouTuber, or I would have mentioned it.

Re: Civilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking

#194

Post by toomuchtodo »

nomel wrote: post #178
toomuchtodo wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> GPS is not, and never will be, reliable enough for IFR on its own. WAAS GPS (~7.6M accuracy) is reliable enough for IFR on its own that many approaches have removed legacy RF ILS equipment for instrument approaches (RNAV LPV with synthetic glidescope from GNSS). I would agree this does not apply to the vast majority of general aviation (although certified receivers supporting this are well within the reach of GA at…

It's demonstrated fact that GPS is not 100% reliable, which would be required to meet the "on its own" requirement. See the article you're commenting under, and documentation about it from the FAA [1]. [1] https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/av...

100% reliable is not a requirement per FAA regs cited. Legacy navigation equipment fails too.

Re: Civilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking

#195

Post by Mawr »

27183 wrote: post #129
SoftTalker wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> General aviation (GA) is significantly less safe than commercial air travel Since I've been paying attention from the peanut gallery, watching Blancolirio videos, etc. I would never fly on a small private plane. Seems like once a week there is a crash of a small GA craft somewhere, often with fatalities, due to loss of control (i.e. nothing wrong with the aircraft). Pilots seem to become overconfident or complacent…

When I was training 20yr ago we practiced stalls, spin recovery, simulated random engine-out scenarios.. do they not do that anymore? I was pretty confident barring some catastrophic mechanical failure I could probably get it on the ground or into the water (or trees) in one piece. The big question remains though: what now? If you're knocked unconscious (likely--lap belt, big flat instrument panel at face height) the…

> It's probably about right to compare the risk profile to motorcycle riding.

I'd say it's probably not, many motorcycle riders deliberately choose a motorcycle because it's "fun", meaning they go around speeding on purpose, so the crash stats are very negatively skewed by those deliberately behaving recklessly, just how driving crash stats are skewed by people driving under the influence.

That's a bit of a different approach than to flying a plane, and yet GA is super dangerous. That's because unlike motorcycling, flying is inherently unsafe, there's no "just stop" option if you have an issue. The default is crashing. The only reason commercial aviation is so safe is the incredible effort that's been put into engineering safety systems at thousands of layers, from mechanical to human factors, but hardly any of that applies to GA.

So IMO, if you ride as responsibly as you fly, riding should be way safer.

Re: Civilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking

#196

Post by 27183 »

jjwiseman wrote: post #179

I run GPSJAM.org, have been studying and tracking the effects of GPS interference on aviation for the past 5 years, and I was a source for this article. I'm not a pilot and I don't work for any aviation agency. I'm very curious to see what the final NTSB report says, but their preliminary report along with commentary from other analysts seems to show that this was a crew that made bad choices and died because of it.…

I wonder what the human factors consequences of having a GPS/chartplotter working almost all the time and then suddenly fail are. Well, I don't wonder that much, but it would be interesting to see the data. It seems a similarly jarring situation to having an AI chatbot that most of the time gets things right but then occasionally gets something wildly (albeit plausibly) wrong. Or self-driving car technology that occasionally (rarely) tries to drive into the median. It seems like it renders the user more complacent and less able or likely to respond to the failure safely and correctly.

So is it safer? If the answer is "yes, until it fails" that's pretty bad. Things fail, systems degrade, and we need to be able to adapt safely. If the transition between "everything working" and "degraded performance" causes a safety issue... that's kind of a systemic failure isn't it?

[edit] maybe it's a UX issue? What if interacting with the GPS had the same UX as the VOR? The failover would be a lot less disruptive. That's kind of where I always end up with chart plotters.. like, you need to be using the paper chart anyway if you want to be able to fail over safely and quickly... so does the chartplotter really add anything? Or does it take things away?

Re: Civilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking

#197

Post by nomel »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #194
nomel wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's demonstrated fact that GPS is not 100% reliable, which would be required to meet the "on its own" requirement. See the article you're commenting under, and documentation about it from the FAA [1]. [1] https://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/av...

100% reliable is not a requirement per FAA regs cited. Legacy navigation equipment fails too.

Then I think you should re-read the original comment, with this revelation in mind.

Re: Civilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking

#198

Post by VBprogrammer »

dmitrygr wrote: post #180
VBprogrammer wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> GPS is not essential to air navigation. It’s nice to have, and there are some approaches that legally require it to be operational in order to fly them (IFR procedures) but aviation has other systems in place to guide aircraft under conditions where visual flight navigation is impossible. This has not been the practical reality for many years for IFR flights (arguably not for VFR flight either but some of the good…

Does Europe not have VORs?

Of course - though many of them have been decommissioned or are in the process. Though recent developments have probably reduced the enthusiasm for removing them so quickly.

However, that doesn't change the fact that the intersection that ATC are flying you towards are actually now defined as coordinates, not radials or distances from nearby VORs.

If an ATC tells you "direct OKSAW" they won't give you a VOR radial to intercept - you are expected to go straight there in a relatively straight line from your current position. There were boxes like the KNS80 that could do VOR-VOR navigation to do this kind of thing but it's not user friendly by modern standards.

Re: Civilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking

#199

Post by wil421 »

idlewords wrote: post #188
mrngld wrote: post #15

When I used to fly in Florida in the 2005-2015ish timeframe, NOTAMs for GPS interference (it didn't say that exactly but that's what it meant) were an everyday occurrence along my path, it became boilerplate. I experienced it a few times. One moment the GPS thinks you're plodding along next to Ocala, next moment it thinks I've teleported a thousand miles away, and then it'd just quit. But that's what we train for. Th…

The highest mountain summit in Florida is 105 meters above sea level.

Did you misspell hill? It’s not like some sand mountain jets up 300 feet all of the sudden.

Re: Civilian plane crash in New Mexico tied to military GPS blocking

#200

Post by alistairSH »

mrngld wrote: post #15

When I used to fly in Florida in the 2005-2015ish timeframe, NOTAMs for GPS interference (it didn't say that exactly but that's what it meant) were an everyday occurrence along my path, it became boilerplate. I experienced it a few times. One moment the GPS thinks you're plodding along next to Ocala, next moment it thinks I've teleported a thousand miles away, and then it'd just quit. But that's what we train for. Th…

You're not wrong, but that doesn't necessarily mean Uncle Sam should be dicking around with GPS jammers as a normal thing (at least not without acknowledging that doing so changes the risk profile of aviation to some extent).
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