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Senate Votes To Replace Aviation Radar With GPS
plover writes "The US Senate on Monday passed by a 93-0 margin a bill that would implement the FAA's NextGen plan to replace aviation radar with GPS units. It will help pay for the upgrade by increasing aviation fuel taxes on private aircraft. It will require two inspections per year on foreign repair stations that work on US planes. And it will ban pilots from using personal electronics in the cockpit. This just needs to be reconciled with the House version and is expected to become law soon. This was discussed on Slashdot a few years ago."
While the nextgen plan is a good thing, the rest is crap. We can get legislation to ban laptops, but we can't get the HORRENDOUSLY dangerous rest regulations fixed. How about NOT giving in to the airline lobbyists for once and actually doing something to make air travel SAFER????
This just adds to the consequences of the inevitable solar flare that will knock out all our satellites.
what if some big foreign country who has anti satellite weapons decides to blow up our GPS satellites?
So each plane sends its location back to air traffic control? How is this system secured? This will be breached repeatedly. Also, what happens when a solar storm takes out the satellites? I'm sure GPS is a better system under normal circumstances, but circumstances are not always normal.
So exactly how prone will this system be to;
Don't get me wrong, this has a lot of upside, it's just important we have a good idea what the down side is, how significant it is, and what the expected impact on American business and transportation will be.
And what were the other 7 senators doing that day? Biden (the VP) is technically part of the senate, but I'll give him a pass on this. I'll be checking to see if my senator(s) were busy sleeping in that day.
Uh, the VP only votes in case of a tie.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
If this appropriately meets FAA guidelines than this is fine.
In cockpit systems a standby attitude device must be installed in the cockpit as a fallback system unless the existing cockpit systems have dual redundancy.
Along the same token the GPS DAMN WELL better have a backup system of some sort. This backup may be a radar system or it may be an INS system combined with altitude sensors or use of VOR/TACAN systems. There just has to be something there.
What? Where did that come from? The link in the summary points to the slashdot posting about the airliner that overflew its destination by a bit. THAT summary talks about the crew using their laptops during the flight. However, I am not sure that's the case. In fact, I am led to believe that they had both nodded off. So, while removing personal electronics from the flight deck might be attractive to people who want to remove distractions, in reality it's often useful to have a distraction to keep one alert, particularly during a long period that would otherwise be spent largely in inactivity. If the purpose is to reduce interference with GPS equipment, well, I am not aware of this being a problem. If it really is an issue, presumably the pax will have to forego their MP3 players. Also, my headset (my own) is a nice active noise reducing device. It enhances my performance by allowing me to hear stuff more clearly, and protects my hearing. Will that be banned? More rules, less safety. Rah! Charlie
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of
government. It can only exist until the voters discover
that they can vote themselves largess from the public
treasury. From that time on the majority always votes
for the candidates promising the most benefits from the
public treasury, with the results that a democracy
always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed
by a dictatorship.
-- Alexander Fraser Tytler (1742-1813)
I mean from what I understand you use GPS to find out where you are and then have to radio that to air control. Besides it being hacked what happens in the simple case that a GPS unit on a certain plane is broken and reports the wrong location? (I'm guessing there's some sort of "checksum" to prevent this but then again I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't any either.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
I love how everyone here just damn well knows what's better for the FAA. All the OMG they better have a backup, as if it's Windows Me or something. Look; pilots are very smart people. They aren't going to get in a plane that doesn't have some sort of backup nav. That said, you guys worry about things way too much. I know one-engine props crash more than passenger airliners, but how many of you have been on a dual turbo-prop? They say the other engine will get you all the way to the crash site... And how many of you guys have backup systems for your car's brakes? No? No one? OMG!!! Really? You could skid through an intersection at any time! Look at what Microsoft has done to everyone. As they say, I'm really glad the rest of the world is more reliable than Windows.
Well, there are a couple of senators who are sick and cannot attend, and if it wasn't for the amendment to the health care reform bill, many of them would have been off on junkets or in committee meetings. 93 is actually a high number for such an uncontroversial bill.
I'm guessing that they will not throw out radar entirely for primary surveillance. They'll need it to track things that don't transmit their position, like aircraft with failed electronics.
Or drug smugglers, or hijackers, or an incoming air raid, or anybody else who doesn't want to intentionally broadcast their location... Granted, civilian primary radar is not going to help much with an incoming military air raid.
Overall, however, I think that it is a good way to cut down quite a bit of the cost (potentially) and provide better service.
In dense traffic areas, there is some reason to keep track of aircraft. But other than that, it's none of the government's business where I am. No personal electronics in the cockpit? Sounds innocent, but this has avionics lobby people written all over it. They want all the equipment to be installed (read: more expensive), not carried on board. My hand held gps - aircraft variey - does fine for visual flight operations. I don't need any of this fancy stuff. The "gps radar" installation is going to cost more than a lot of airplanes.
I've noticed that when the lives of hundreds of thousands of people depend on a single piece of equipment, that it tends to be designed and tested to higher standards than cheap consumer equipment..
which is totally what she said
I can tell from comments that not many of you are private pilots. They are paying for this with yet another tax on fuel for private planes. The FAA keeps raising fees on everything associated with having a private plane while giving big breaks to commercial companies. I'm sick of it.
It doesnt sound safe to me, especially in a post 911 world.
Well, of course not. If you're one of those people who uses the phrase "post-9/11 world" without (conscious) irony, you're never going to feel safe. Just be thankful you have the specter of terrorism to focus your fear on, instead of the countless vague fears that preyed on your mind in the long and dreadful period between the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of al Qaeda.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
For the sake of safety and security, why don't we use both? It isn't like they are mutually exclusive... Then if there is a failure, you have a, you know, a backup plan? Not to mention we have these new fangled things called computers, that are like, really good at doing calculations really fast... so you could like correlate both systems to each other and increase the accuracy of both likely. I am already assuming that they are going to use base stations to auto correct the positions from known values also. Anyway the more redundancy the better I say.
Oh -- and to back up the GP's point, the US has been stripping the constitution of its protections our founders provided to slow or stop popular "passions" from dramatically changing our government quickly (see Federalist 10). The 17th amendment is a prime example -- and is marching us closer and closer to a direct democracy -- and our days *WILL* be numbered.
A lot of people believe that God created the Earth 4,000 years ago. That doesn't mean it's true.
This is a typical example of those without a voice paying for services enjoyed by those who can afford lobbyists. This new system will be paid for with a tax on fuel sold to private pilots. Folks like your next door neighbor who takes his little Cessna out on weekends. However, this system is needed due to heavier and heavier commercial air traffic in Class A and B airspace and commercial traffic over the ocean (both of which are areas which seldom see private pilots).
So, if you can afford a small army of lobbyists and brib... I mean campaign contributions, you can get a law passed that taxes private citizens to raise money to pay for infrastructure necessitated by business activity. This would be like placing a high road-use tax on private automobiles while allowing commercial trucking to use the roads without road-use taxes. Completely backwards.
Sure, if you force private air travel to be only affordable to the super rich, then they will only be affordable to the super rich. However, *you* would be creating that situation artificially.
Small aircraft are the only reasonable way to get to an awful lot of places, unless you were prefer things taking weeks to get places because everything has to travel by car to a port, and then boat to another one, and then back on yet another car.
Personally, I would rather not artificially distort markets just because I decided I don't like something. Just because Europe decided to make fuel an order of magnitude more expensive than places that don't tax it doesn't make them right.