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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

#91

Post by entrope »

billwear wrote: post #67

I guess there’s no way to constrain these jamming signals to some reasonable perimeter? 400 miles of overspill seems like sloppy engineering.

Depends on the source and what you're trying to exercise. M-Code and spot beams are supposed to provide something like 20 dB of jamming resistance, and if your jammer is not right next to the target then the jamming could be a factor a long way off. (For reference, a target 40 miles from a jammer would see ~20 dB more interference than a target 400 miles away. White Sands Missile Range is 3200 square miles, but much longer north-south than east-west.)

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

#92

Post by gpm »

tclancy wrote: post #85
Suzuran wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't worry, our government is doing their level best to make GPS the only option for air navigation. After all, we all know that technology NEVER fails, and the sooner we can turn off all those big bad old ground radars and navigation aids, the sooner we can sell all that real estate and use the money for things that the American public desperately needs, like more corporate bailouts and bathroom security cameras.

They’re going to eliminate windows?

The weather already does that on a regular basis... though they are doing their best to make the weather, on average (i.e. what you might call a climate), worse.

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

#93

Post by wat10000 »

treis wrote: post #88
jatora wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty clear they're laying out that this is pilot error, unlike the article's intent to blame parties other than the pilot. The poster is trying to correct that, from an obvious place of knowledge and experience most of us do not have, and isn't being rude about it either. It's important to understand why things happen in order to prevent them, and to counter the narrative of the opinionated article. And if we…

More than one thing can be true. Flying into the side of a mountain is an error by the pilot (obviously). It can also be true that if GPS wasn't being jammed it wouldn't have happened.

“If X was different then Y wouldn’t have happened” is a useless way to evaluate things that leads one to blame a butterfly flapping its wings for causing a hurricane.

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

#94

Post by 27183 »

the_af wrote: post #87
rootsudo wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very much goofy, especially when people here try to extrapolate ground stop / AOG / IROPS. True armchair warrior without any competence.

I'd say this can be generalized: threads on HN are goofy about all the kinds of things HN readers and hackers are unfamiliar with but think they have the common sense to reason about. This week I witnessed a similarly illogical argument between someone who thought they could argue about AI in movies and someone who actually works in the movie industry and has years of experience. The hacker was lecturing the movie pe…

Dunning-Kruger lives!

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

#95

Post by wat10000 »

gpm wrote: post #57
1123581321 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you expect might change between the preliminary and the final report?

Well for one I would expect the final report to actually come to any sort of conclusion and not just transcribe the conversations between air traffic control and the plane, and the data recorded by the plane. The preliinary report doesn't support (or contradict) the judgment that the pilots just need to "get gud" at all - it doesn't make that sort of judgment at all. For another I'd note that past investigations into…

> a procedure only allowed when "local altimeter setting [is] received" - apparently referring to GPS

Ok, please just stop. A certain minimum level of knowledge is necessary to discuss these things and you don’t have it.

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

#96

Post by ck2 »

could spread-spectrum GPS solve this or would military just jam all frequencies

how about ANS (aka R2-D2) the 1960s version of GPS that used stars

instead of stars, preload all the known positions of LEO constellations

can they put this on a single chip 60 years later?

* https://theaviationgeekclub.com/heres-why-r2-d2-the-sr-71-as...

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

#97

Post by wat10000 »

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'.

It was, and one of the pilots was doing the right thing and would have saved the plane no problem if they had been the only one flying the plane. The problem was that the other pilot insisted on doing exactly the wrong thing, didn’t say what he was doing, and the plane didn’t give nearly enough indication that it was receiving contradictory inputs from the two sets of controls.

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

#98

Post by streetfighter64 »

p-e-w wrote: post #80
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.

If it’s true that other navigation systems are as safe and capable as GPS, then GPS navigation should be randomly disabled in every aircraft occasionally to ensure that pilots remain fluent in using them. If it isn’t true, then the military is partially responsible for the crash of this aircraft.

No, pilots should ensure they're current at navigating without GPS because it can fail, just like pilots practice engine failure procedures and every other emergency / non-normal procedure. That doesn't mean it should be "randomly disabled" for the same reason that you don't test software in production or randomly turn off the engine of the plane. Obviously.

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

#99

Post by gpm »

wat10000 wrote: post #93
treis wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More than one thing can be true. Flying into the side of a mountain is an error by the pilot (obviously). It can also be true that if GPS wasn't being jammed it wouldn't have happened.

“If X was different then Y wouldn’t have happened” is a useless way to evaluate things that leads one to blame a butterfly flapping its wings for causing a hurricane.

Not useless if you can identify and stop the butterflies that cause hurricanes.

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

#100

Post by streetfighter64 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #48
jatora wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

HN threads on aviation are always a bit goofy to anyone who's actually flown a plane, yeah.

Perhaps I'm being a bit reductive, but threads on anything that you're more well versed in than the average person, are evidently almost always goofy. It's called the "Gell-Mann Amnesia" effect.
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