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The Plane Crash That Gave Us GPS
HughPickens.com writes: Sarah Laskow reports at The Atlantic about the aftereffects of the KAL 007 incident, where the Soviet Union shot down a passenger plane on September 1, 1983. All 269 passengers were killed, including a U.S. Congressman en route from New York City to Seoul via Anchorage. At first, the Soviet Union wouldn't even admit its military had shot the plane down, but the Reagan administration immediately started pushing to establish what had happened and stymie the operations of the Soviet Aeroflot airline. It is widely believed that Korean Air Lines Flight 007 was already well off course when the crew routinely radioed that it was over its proper ''way point,'' or checkpoint, at a 90-degree angle to Shemya Island in the West Aleutian chain. Ultimately, the Boeing 747 jumbo jet cut across the lower tip of the Kamchatka Peninsula and the southern tip of Sakhalin Island, where it was shot down by a Soviet fighter.
This resulted in President Reagan making a notable choice. While this choice was reported at the time, it was not the biggest news to come out of this event: Reagan decided to speed up the timeline for civilian use of GPS. The U.S. had already launched almost a dozen satellites into orbit that could help locate its military craft, on land, in the air, or on the sea. But the use of the system was restricted. Now, Reagan said, as soon as the next iteration of the GPS system was working, it would be available for free. It took more than $10 billion and over 10 years for the second version of the U.S.'s GPS system to come fully online. But in 1995, as promised, it was available to private companies for consumer applications. It didn't take long, though, for commercial providers of GPS services to start complaining about the system's "selective availability" which reserved access to the best, most precise signals for the U.S. military. In 2000, not that long before he left office, President Clinton got rid of selective availability and freed the world from ever depending on paper maps or confusing directions from relatives again.
This resulted in President Reagan making a notable choice. While this choice was reported at the time, it was not the biggest news to come out of this event: Reagan decided to speed up the timeline for civilian use of GPS. The U.S. had already launched almost a dozen satellites into orbit that could help locate its military craft, on land, in the air, or on the sea. But the use of the system was restricted. Now, Reagan said, as soon as the next iteration of the GPS system was working, it would be available for free. It took more than $10 billion and over 10 years for the second version of the U.S.'s GPS system to come fully online. But in 1995, as promised, it was available to private companies for consumer applications. It didn't take long, though, for commercial providers of GPS services to start complaining about the system's "selective availability" which reserved access to the best, most precise signals for the U.S. military. In 2000, not that long before he left office, President Clinton got rid of selective availability and freed the world from ever depending on paper maps or confusing directions from relatives again.
I'm sure any Slashdot post invoking both of these political figures will attract only the most calm and well-reasoned discussion.
If only GPS were enough to stop the shootings-down of airliners by Russians...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
But in 1995, as promised, it was available to private companies for consumer applications
Say what? There were consumer GPS receivers in the late 1980's, in fact in the first Gulf War (2 August 1990 – 28 February 1991) many soldiers used commercial units purchased from US retailers because the crypto hardened milspec units were in such short supply. In fact I'm not sure what they're referring to with the 1995 date, since the biggest change wrt consumer use was Clinton's order to permanently disable selective availability, but that wasn't until 2000.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
So, which of these links is the original article the large excerpt is from?
I really wish OA was linked separately at the top or something. Why was it the 3rd link? Why not anchor it on "The Atlantic" in the first line?
http://www.theatlantic.com/tec...
Thanks...
Trusting software vendors is no smarter than trus
In my experience GPS let's you down when you need it the most. More than once I have had to fall back to maps and a compass when the terrain got too rough for GPS to work. As far as confusing directions go talk to the people, if they are still alive, who got stuck or drove their car over cliffs etc. I still do not trust it except under the best conditions and when I have another method to confirm its correctness.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
The ACTOR?!?!?
> "freed the world from ever depending on paper maps or confusing directions from relatives again"
It's entirely plausible that GPS, or any equivalent, will die before minkind does. Mad Max, seen it?
I'm a walker in the UK and I still use paper maps and a compass as my primary navigation method. I do carry a really old and simple GPS receiver (a Garmin GPS12) but that's purely as a backup.
Paper maps don't go flat and as a bonus they don't break when you have a nasty fall and land hard on your GPS receiver.
As for people stupid enough to try and use their smartphone as a GPS navigation tool in the wild outdoors, well I feel sadness for anyone stupid enough to do that because the consequences are potentially so serious.
GPS is great for telling you HOW to to another location. What it can't do is tell you WHY you want to go to that other location. On the other hand you can look at a paper map and go "That looks like a spot I WANT to go to".
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Do you remember Iran Air Flight 655? How US celebrated revenge. All 290 on board, including 66 children and 16 crew, died.
Article tries to make Clinton a hero for it. I've definitely almost driven into a lake in southeast indiana because the maps weren't updated - and that's when my Garmin was brand new. GPS is just as horrendous as pen and paper or a map if you don't already know where you're going and what streets you're looking for.
I'm sure any Slashdot post invoking both of these political figures will attract only the most calm and well-reasoned discussion.
Did you talk about Hitler? I think I see a Hitler reference in that comment. Godwin's Law! Godwin's Law!
(This is meant to be a joke.)
Seriously, when did it become OK to revise history that getting shot down by an Russian Su-15 with a Kaliningrad missile is now a crash?
In the immortal words of Socrates, who said; 'I drank what?'
Be aware of them, and work within them or around them. You might need to upgrade your GPS receiver. My first android phone had GPS, but it was crappy to the point of being worthless.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
So Reagan gave us GPS in exactly the same way Al Gore gave us the internet. What would civilization do without blowhard politicians !
I'm encouraging my engineers to refer to GPS as GNSS, as there are 3 other systems
Glosnass, the Russian system which is now operating.
BeiDou the Chinese system also operational.
And Galileo, the EU system which has had all sorts of delays.
46137
GPS is nice but people often misunderstand its accuracy, availability & stability. First off accuracy, your average private GPS (TomTom, Phone, handheld) is only about 30' accurate on a fairly good day, so if you buried a valuable out in the middle of a field and your only reference to it was your phones GPS you might have to dig for quite a while in an area the size of a double garage in order to find it. Next would be availability, almost anything can block GPS signals using standard receivers, trees, buildings, roofs, so it is practically useless for some forms of navigation (in store, subterranean, dense tree canopies, ect). And finally stability, it has only been around for about 30 years and is highly complex to keep up and running, it requires about two dozen satellites to function & global ground monitoring stations to keep it accurate.
I had this signature before the sentiment went mainstream. But welcome to the club...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
And I was there.
Reagan may have sped up this or that, but
- GPS was designed as a mixed civilian / military system. That's why there WAS selective availability (AKA SA - fuzzing of civilian accuracy). SA was designed to give 30 meter accuracy, and lots of civilian needs could still be met with that accuracy.
- Lots of us wondered why KAL 007 didn't have GPS - a 30 meter error was tiny compared to their actual error.
- There was intense commercial interest in GPS in 1983.
- Use of GPS has always been free - even under SA, you either had the keys to decrypt it, or not.
- The real big push for commercial development came during the first Gulf War, when we didn't have nearly enough military units, and so Charley Trimble (Trimble Navigation - and others) got a huge order to send outdoor units to the Persian Gulf ASAP - AND they turned off Selective Availability (globally, for the duration).
The part about Clinton and SA was accurate. However, by the 90's. a lot of people were working on work-arounds for SA. SA implemented by making each satellite's clock go fast and slow deliberately, so you could fix it by having a ground station with a good clock looking at the same satellite, and sending corrections, so removing SA wasn't as big a deal as it would have been in 1985.
or under water. or under canopy. or under anything really.
GPS requires direct line of sight to at least 3-4 satellites.
Anyway it is just a limitation of the system, as does anything.
I started with commercial GPS in 1995 myself, so went though the stage of scrambled to non-scrambled GPS. The oldest device I used was a Garmin SVRY II, which tells me that there was at least one shittier version before that :)
Surprised no one mentioned base stations. Which were really the way commercial GPS got around the military scramble. Old school GPS would communicate, or could be corrected by local base station data, which were at a good known locations and coordinates. Of course I think they are all gone now, as they are no longer needed. Though in some cases the electronics of the day being what they were would require a computer and post interpolation of the data as the devices themselves didn't have the guts to do it.
That said there is nothing stopping the military from turning on the scramble again and making all your new fangled GPS rather useless, now that all the base stations are gone! Which is probably was Russia has their own. As does Japan (sort of). The EU and India are building their own. So much distrust! Or at least perceived dependence on GPS,
Then again, I am pretty sure GPS assist uses cell towers in much the same way, so long as you're in cellphone range you would probably be OK (each tower would be at know good coordinate locations).
Aside from headaches with the constant droning of CNN repeating ad infinitum "where is the missing plane"?
My guess is that these two planes will give us in-flight telemetry, essentially all-the-time black boxes writing data to servers. There was an air-france plane that crashed in the ocean a few years back and it took them more than a year to locate any wreckage.
I'm dubious we'll ever locate MH370, mostly because they are either looking in the wrong area or the area they are looking in is very inhospitable, even for ships at sea.
MH17 was shot down by Russian and/or Ukranian forces, and that's going to give us headaches just like KAL007 -- because its causing heated relations with the Russians.
Regardless, every crash is investigated and the root cause creates ripples that changes the entire industry. As a result, air travel is one of the safest ways to get around.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
What WAS restricted was the high resolution capability (better than 10' precision).
I was using GPS in the middle 70s with the low resolution. Good for something like 50' resolution.
What actually caused the government to quit restricting was the fact that using the GPS satellites in a hyperbolic geometry (which gave resolutions better than about 5') was then fast enough for the newer computers to use. The French were already demonstrating the capability.
It made nice PR to say KAL 007 was why, it cost nothing (just disabling the encryption of the high resolution message).
GPS is great and works most of the time. The problem is the maps have no consideration whatsoever. Especially nautical charts.
GPS may be accurate, but overlay that with charts and I'm sailing through downtown Cleveland for what good they are. I can't count the false reality they attempt to project.
If part of that $10 billion was allocated to making sure the maps and the GPS coordinates were on more than a nodding acquaintance, then I'd at least run into land a lot less.
I'm a satanic clam.
Just think what wonders we could have if we shot them all.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It didn't take long, though, for commercial providers of GPS services to start complaining about the system's "selective availability" which reserved access to the best, most precise signals for the U.S. military.
Actually the most precise signals (Precision (P) code) are still restricted, even though the selective availability (which was basically introducing jitter) was turned off for the Coarse/Acquisition (C/A) code.
Obama's fumbled every damn thing he's touched - relations with Russia ("Fuck the EU...), Obamacare, ISIS, Ebola (just watch the CDC go back and forth about how Ebola can/can't be spread by sneeze droplets...), the whole damn Middle East, European relations (think the Poles are happy about Obama pulling missile defense from them? Guess who called Obama "the real chickenshit" just a few days ago...)
I don't really care for the guy myself but laying the Ebola response on his doorstep is rather petty. Everything about CDC's response to Ebola screams "Government bureaucrats covering their ass" to me, which would have happened regardless of who was President. They started out quite sensibly, pointing out that Ebola does not spread casually, then the hospital in Texas screwed up with the first case of Ebola on American soil and the kneejerk overreaction + media feeding frenzy was on.
Said kneejerk overreaction has now permeated all levels of healthcare, to the point that I presented at my Doctor's Office yesterday with foot pains, which turned out to be stress fractures, a logical consequence of running a marathon just two weeks prior. I informed them of this recent history, my belief that it was either a stress fracture or simple overuse injury, so naturally the first question they had for me was "Have you traveled to West Africa in the last 21 days or had contact with anyone who has?"
Foot pain + recent marathon = EBOLA SCARE!!!! GOTTA COVER OUR ASS!!! HE MIGHT HAVE EBOLA!!!!
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
If part of that $10 billion was allocated to making sure the maps and the GPS coordinates were on more than a nodding acquaintance, then I'd at least run into land a lot less
So how's that job search going Captain Schettino?
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the (supposed) good of its victims may be the most oppressive
What I wonder is, did he get laid ? (After all, that was the root cause in that crash.)
My paper tends to bend and flex, and when I place many sheets of it on top of each other they seem to get taller for some reason.
Instead of confusing directions from relatives, you occasionaly get improbable confusing directions from your satnav.
"Ahead, drive straight ahead" twice in 30 seconds.
*looks at map*
The blue line showing intended course shows a left turn. "Dammit, left turn in 500 feet? WTF?" followed by quick mirror glance and hard left if possible. Which isn't often at all. x.x
Tom Tom, get yer shit together!
After using satnav for 5 years I can see how we (US) can miss the intended target and make a holy place a holey one instead by accident.
I still won't go back to paper.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
And one more skill disappears from the public's toolkit. (Along with being able to make change and others.)
I remember when the Iowa Basics tests taken in grade school used to include a section on map reading. Nowadays, it seems most people don't even know how to open a map let alone read one.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
"the aftereffects of the KAL 007 incident, where the Soviet Union shot down a passenger plane .. the Reagan administration immediately started pushing to establish what had happened"
What happened was the US military was routinely flying surveillance aircraft into Soviet airspace, the Soviets mistook the civilian aircraft for a military one and shot it down.
Empty words don't count, I'm afraid.
you must be to actually think that there is any sort of special privilege involved in doing your work for you
But this happened in 1983. Slashdot scooped this story 31 years after the fact.. and you know what.. there is probably going to be a dupe of this story next week.
As someone who uses GPS technology extensively for work, I have to say, that selective avaialibilty is still very much in action. The US can I assume at a push of a button distort the data avaialable. Or is it coincidence that the data reliability is at times very unreliable near Ukraine since the crisis? Not as much to throw off consumer gps navigation devices, but enough to render GPS based targeting systems useless I'd say.
Some background.. around the Clinton era thingy... I think it was three plane crashes that convinced President Clinton to remove SA.
I wrote an E-mail to President Clinton(1997) pointing out, that three recent crashes had a common factor, which was Controlled flight into terrain because the pilots did not know their position. CFiT crashes were "1995, American Airlines Flight 965", "1996, Ron Brown, US commerce secretary", "1997, Guam".
I pointed in my emails that SA induced errors had prevented the Airline industry from widely adopting GPS as a navigation aid. And that a Cd-rom sized database, coupled with accurate unscrambled GPS signals could have prevent these crashes. I also pointed out that non-SA'd GPS signals had many other useful civilian purposes. (car nav, marine nav, etc.)
Imagine to my surprise, when I received a written reply letter (Sept, 1997), from the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense(Space). Outlining DOD and FAA plans to integrate GPS into the aviation industry and President Clinton's pending consideration, (starting in 2000), to remove SA scrambling from the GPS signal. The rest is history
Who knew...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
and lack the basic moral fiber to admit it. Face it son, people like you are not at all special and quite easy to predict and ignore.