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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."
This just adds to the consequences of the inevitable solar flare that will knock out all our satellites.
and what if evil munchkins land on the wing to sabotage the engine and the only one who sees it is a guy who every one thinks is crazy? what if...
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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.
You assume people understand what their wishes are. There was a news story of a guy marching against socialized medicine in his Medicare provided scooter.
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This is as much about increasing airway capacity as increasing safety, over ocean there is no radar coverage so that aircraft have to be kept very well spaced, which is becoming a bottleneck on busy routes e.g. US North East to Northern Europe. With GPS you can increase density without decreasing safety. And it will probably save money in the long term - the GPS based systems are inherently cheaper, but you have to put up money in front to run both systems in parallel, and you don't get the payback until you can begin switching off radars. So it needs short term funding to cover the spending hump.
Basically, this is an unsurprising bit of good housekeeping - as shown by the vote. It was a change that would have to be made sometime, and the only real question was exactly when: costs will almost certainly fall if you delay, but that puts off the arrival of benefits as well.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
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
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