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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 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 :(
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.
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.
Planes already send their location back to ATC using query/response from the ground radar in an easily breached system. We haven't seen the big scary terrorists making fake planes appear on screens yet. In fact the current system is significantly more vulnerable, as it can only handle so many planes in its "view" at a time. Try to imagine loading that up with a few hundred fake transponders that block out real aircraft from showing up - essentially an ATC DoS attack. NextGen would, I hope, be considerably harder to attack in that method. With the current method it isn't unheard of for busy areas to DoS themselves from overload so it's already a weak model.
Also while I don't think GPS is or could ever be 100% reliable, we pilots do have something called pilotage, paper charts, and good old fashioned flying that we can use to get where we're going. It isn't as cool or convenient as a big moving map on your panel, but is a tried and true way to safely navigate that folks have been using since Jeppesen invented aeronautical charting. Even if some freak solar storm blew out all of the GPS satellites, pilots aren't going to suddenly find themselves completely lost, and planes aren't going just drop out of the sky. GPS receivers and transponders fail in planes from time to time, and we have backup plans to account for that and continue on. It's really not the end of the world. In effect an aircraft could suffer entire avionics failure and still make it down just fine.
NextGen is not the end of the world, it's a much needed upgrade to a vastly outdated system. It's better than what we have now, and if it breaks there won't be airliners crashing right and left. It's OK.
My personal beef with it is the "personal electronics" thing. I use my phone to access aviation information (weather, databases, etc) and fail to see why I should stop just because a couple wankers couldn't stop playing Doom in the cockpit or whatever they were doing. Federal Aviation Regs *already* have clauses to deal with pilot stupidity, this is just extra bullshit with literally zero benefit.
GPS, since the plane's antenna is semi-omnidirectional, is easily jammed.
The problem is, the semi-direction, as you call it, is pointed up. Most GPS satellites are up there rather than down here. And most/all jammers will be down here, where it isn't pointing. You're going to need about 20 dB more power just for that alone.
A weak signal can't interfere far away. So, just fly on for a mile, and its all good again.
A strong signal can be easily detected/pinpointed/eliminated by military ECM/ECCM aircraft.
Its unlikely a ground based jammer could be effective for more than a couple hours.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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.
My personal beef with it is the "personal electronics" thing. I use my phone to access aviation information (weather, databases, etc) and fail to see why I should stop just because a couple wankers couldn't stop playing Doom in the cockpit or whatever they were doing. Federal Aviation Regs *already* have clauses to deal with pilot stupidity, this is just extra bullshit with literally zero benefit.
The /. summary was incorrect (surprise surprise). The actual bill "bans pilots from using wireless devices or laptops in the cockpit that are unrelated to work." So you can still use your weather info. In fact, the MSP pilots were also doing work-related stuff so I don't know what ninny put that clause in as it doesn't even apply in a knee-jerk manner....
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007