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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.
How often do you fly out of castles?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
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.
Leave my X-Men LARPing out of this :(
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.
In the literal sense, light aircraft not equiped with GPS, (Drug or people smugglers), and of course aircraft that have been hijacked and their transponders disabled.
Or some kid in a baloon (hoax or not, its probably not going to do an engine any good if it sucks it in...
And if the pilots are too busy playing with their laptops to even look out of the window...
It doesnt sound safe to me, especially in a post 911 world.
Didn't they delay a shuttle launchto avoid a GPS clock rollover? Will they ground all the world's aircraft for the next one?
1. In the UK NOTAMs ( Notice to airmen) are issued on a regular basis for GPS jamming trials. They take place over several weeks, and are, I believe, carried out by the army. I am not sure if their intention is to remove the possibility of soldiers on exercise using GPS rather than other means to navigate, or for some other reason.
I fly gliders and have a GPS unit on board which is used as a navigation aid. I also carry a chart (as required by air law) which serves as primary aid for navigation.
2. I would be pretty confident that all airliners currently in service have GPS capability
3. Radar is useful for seeing where everyone else is, GPS is for finding yourself. While transmitting location/vector information from an airbourne GPS to a ground station would enable collision avoidance, this feature is currently available through transponders. These are a requirement for any aircraft wanting to transit class A airspace.
Holy crap, flying manatees? What else have we got to prepare for in the future when this GPS thing goes into service by the FAA?
But he's not a Senator anymore, and he can't vote unless it's a tie.
This is just a parliamentary tactic the Democrats are using to ram this unpopular legislation down the throats of ordinary, hard-working Americans. They're trying to pass this bill in the dead of night, under the old bridge down town, dressed as hobos and reeking of urine. Write your Congressman, radio your Precinct Boss, phone your local librarian. We need all hands on deck to kill this bill and show the Washington fatcats that we're not going to stand for this. I don't care if it's just to buy toilet paper, but getting a bill through our Congress should take a supermajority, the way God intended! Email Barack Hussein Obama and tell him you don't want socialist aviation!
--Obyron
WHy not have both. Redundancy is a good thing when it comes to this sort of stuff.
Point one: GPS, since the plane's antenna is semi-omnidirectional, is easily jammed. GPS signal strengths are weak. Point Two: Radar is not easily jammed. A jammer can only jam one radial -- and he gives away his angular position when he does. Point Three: Radar can skin track a plane even when the plane's transponder is turned off.
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.
Or, as Robert Heinlein once put it: once the Plebes discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses, it's all over.
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
...and then ...nothing bad happens. The pilot reports a gps failure, air traffic guide her by radar towards the airport. When in range of the airport (assuming the weather is bad enough that the pilot can't see out the window) the pilot lands using the airport's instrument landing beacons.
There is slight disruption to traffic in the area due to slightly wider berth being given to our troubled aircraft, and the priority landing pattern.
(precise details made up - broad effect accurate)
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It's a little hard to tell, but one of the advantages listed is that aircraft outside areas with radar coverage will be able to transmit position information. So reading between the lines they expect to continue using radar, but replacing its role in the system with more up to date data broadcast by the aircraft.
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.
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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 hope they're not going to rely on the GPS for altitude. I've notice a number of times on my bike that my wrist GPS says I'm going downhill when it's obvious to me that I'm going uphill.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
So why the hell are we posting that on the internet?!
/. readers sometimes.
Seriously, I question the intelligence of
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
You're missing the point. The idea behind GPS-driven ADS-B is that it REPLACES surveillance radar.
Here's how it works right now: The ground-based radar sends out a signal; it hits the aircraft and bounces back; ATC now knows which direction and how far away the aircraft is. On top of this, there is a transponder in the aircraft which sends back a coded number assigned by ATC, so that ATC can determine which dot on their radar screen is which aircraft. Additionally, if the transponder has (and has enabled) Mode C (which is required in most congested airspace), it sends back the aircraft's altitude. ATC now has a 3-dimensional fix on the aircraft, with positive verification as to who you are.
ADS-B gets rid of all of this. Instead, the aircraft has a GPS receiver, which gives itself a 3-dimensional fix in space. It transmits this information along with a unique identifier, when interrogated, to ATC. ATC utilizes this information to identify and track the aircraft in 3 dimensional space, as is now done with conventional radar/Mode C.
The problem is, what if GPS goes out? What if some pimply 17 year old kid buys a GPS jammer from Mexico and sets it up on his roof? Every aircraft in the area suddenly loses their ability to receive GPS signals, and all of a sudden ATC has no idea where any of the aircraft are. There is no backup system, because part of NexGen is the decommissioning of all primary surveillance radar.
THAT is the issue.
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 can tell from reading the other comments here that my opinions will be in the minority, but I can personally testify how GOOD this system is.
I do flight testing of military aircraft, and we did a demo with several planes and helicopters a couple years ago on the "ADS-B" system, which is a component of NextGen. I've played with it inflight myself, and surveyed many pilots who used it. So you know I'm not blowing smoke, I won an award for a paper about this system at the 2006 Society of Flight Test Engineers annual symposium.
To give you some context about what NextGen and ADS-B do, here's the idea. (I think this description will be useful, since it appears most of the comments here demonstrate a profound lack of knowledge of the system... but this *IS* /. so I'm not surprised.)
Each plane is equipped with a transponder. It receives GPS position, and broadcasts a packet of data once per second (much more frequently than the usual radar sweep of 10-15 seconds) containing identity, position, aircraft type, speed, heading, altitude, and more.
With just a few thousand dollars worth of optional equipment, each plane can also recieve these broadcast packets of information DIRECTLY from other aircraft. In other words, an airplane will see what the other nearby airplanes are reporting too. Right now, a pilot has very little idea what is around his own plane - if the controller doesn't warn him, he doesn't know about it. The existing collision avoidance systems only show a rough approximation of what's in front of you at roughly the same altitude, but it's very error-prone (based on WWII-era-technology directional radio beacons), and hard to find the targets in many cases. But this sytem lets you see everything that the airspace controller is seeing, and almost instantly - once per second. We found the pilots experienced a four-fold increase in their ability to identify conflicting traffic in front of them, and for the first time were aware of overtaking traffic too (faster stuff coming up behind them).
The ground-based system rebroadcasts ALL of its data (including skin-paint targets) on a separate radio frequency, so any airplane (or even ground observers) can learn about everything in the airspace. Along with this data, it also uploads precipitation radar and other weather data, plus airport information. So the pilot has access to a vast amount of new information. And most of the systems have onboard maps with terrain mapping, helping to keep the pilot away from mountains and other dangerous "cumulo-granite" features.
For the pilot himself, the increase in situational awareness was simply amazing. The immediate and crystal clear presentation of the location of all nearby planes meant that he knew everything going on around him. For the ground controller, the much higher frequency updates combined with the much more detailed information about each plane means improved ability to track and direct those airplanes.
There ARE a few downsides, but they're vastly outweighed by the improvements. As some comments indicate, it does depend on GPS. Well, duh. But so do the navigation systems already onboard the airplanes... and cars... and commercial trucks... and ships... and trains. If GPS goes down, there will be much worse problems than this system going away. Despite what it sounds like, the radars are not going away - some will, but there will still be enough for "skin paint" and radar transponder tracking if needed (Congress and the FAA are not totally stupid). As to GPS jammers, note that the airplane is receiving the GPS data, and broadcasting its information on a totally separate frequency to the ground and to other aircraft. So any GPS jamming (since it's localized) will only affect a few airplanes, not the whole system. And by the way, all serious aircraft have multiple navigation systems; jamming GPS won't kill any airplanes, despite the alarmists.
Finally, let's talk about real-world - this system was installed in portions of Alaska around 2000-2001, as a
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
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.
I'm glad they passed the bill, we really need an updated system. The new stuff gives more accurate info, and (supposedly) will include very accurate weather information (for free) similar to what XM sells for something like $500/yr. Old-fashioned radar coverage works poorly in hilly / mountainous terrain, and gps navigation allows direct flight which will save time, fuel and bucks. The old-time systems are disappearing (NDBs are becoming a rare novelty - and good riddance, I say). I'm also pleased that this doesn't seem to have included 'user fees' for general aviation, which would serve as a deterrent to private flight, and make it more expensive to stay in practice, and more dangerous as a result.
Having said all that, I AM disappointed at the general direction of being tracked and my whereabouts logged with even more consistency and precision by some government entity. Big brother is smacking his lips over this, but at least THIS time we actually get some convenience for our trade off of privacy.
I live in a radar 'dead' zone, and don't have to worry about the FAA watching when occasionally buzzing a neighbor; guess I'd better enjoy it while I can.
You might want to retake your civics classes -- I don't think you understand what a democracy is.
The USA is a Constitutional Republic, not a democracy.
The UK is a Constitutional Monarchy (with a parliamentary implementation of executive powers). It's essentially a Republic.
Switzerland's referendum process makes it more of a democracy. Their current constitution was only adopted in 1999 with direct democracy (through referendums) being a bit over 120 years old or so...
So, I hardily agree with you. "Lets not confuse pompous pronouncements with facts.".
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.
Rubbish. A Democracy is markedly different from a Republic, notably in that there is zero corruption in Democracy, but a higher penalty for having troops out in the field than in a Republic.
Just one more turn... honest this time... is that the sun coming up?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
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.
As somebody who knows and works with several private pilots, that statement is utterly false. Private aircraft are certainly not cheap, but they are definitely not out of reach of the middle class.
Just because *you* don't like them doesn't make those that do wrong. Do you have any statistics on GA fuel usage vs commercial vs automotive that I'm not aware of? I simply don't understand why you're hostile to general aviation. I certainly can agree with you on the over-reliance on commercial air travel. A better utilized rail system would do us some good here-- but private aircraft are most often flown as a hobby by regular people.
+1 Disagree
Here's the list, by the way.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.