FAA Fumbled Its Response to a Surge in GPS Jamming

In the examples given it sounds like ATC was doing things like directing aircraft in to restricted air space. Obviously the captain has final say and ATC’s role is officially just advisory. But this sounds like a bit more than a pilot who forgot how to navigate.

Are they still taught to do NDB approaches? I thought that's been phased out, too. In fact I was told the other day that the US officially tuned off the NDBs? Does not apply to VORs then, but as you say, the fact that they get phased out more and more is concerning.

We still have inertial and radio beacon navigation(VOR, ADF, ILS) , you are always able to disconnect the gps data from the computer.

Obviously GPS is allowing much more precise route and approach navigation, all without ground equipment.

New rules and rutes have been developed the last 15 years to take advantage of GPS precision and global availability.

But current airplanes still keep all the old systems in place and we train with them.

Removal of ground stations could become a problem in the future.

I agree that it is important that alterantive navigationsystems are available.

>> a single point of failure, is pretty concerning.

If is it concerning, we must have a definition of "failure". Does failure mean the inability to fly a route as planned? If so then we cannot fly any routes via GPS that we cannot fly without GPS. So GPS doesn't really add any efficiencies. But if we instead define failure as "danger to life" then we can accept that when GPS fails we will use the other systems to get aircraft to a safe landing, even if flights don't complete as planned. Under that definition we can still enjoy the efficiencies of GPS without maintaining a backup that can instantly replace all GPS functions.

This is very important in a military context too. If you always need a 100% backup at the ready then you cannot ever use a novel system. Any new system won't have a backup that is 100% equal. So to leverage new tech you must accept the risk that you may loose some abilities should it fail. If you won't use the new toy until it has a 100% backup, you will end up never playing with any new toys/weapons.

It's not so much that you can't fly from VOR to VOR, everyone knows how to do so. It's more that it's a horrible waste of time and fuel.

If you have GPS, you will get cleared direct after getting out of congested areas, usually (presuming you are capable of clearing all of the terrain between point A and point B). If you're having to fly from VOR to VOR you will fly a much more indirect route and spend a lot more time and fuel, particularly on private jets.

Hence the offer to put private jets on vectors rather than tell them to fly the old fashioned way. People on private jets tend to be people who make political contributions, who in turn tend to call the congressmen in their pocket and complain.

What I don't understand is how this is supposed to work when the point of using the more precise GPS-based ADS-B positional reporting is for controllers to be able to pack airplanes closer together. If they do this, there will literally not be space in the sky to spread out existing air traffic to radar-based separation requirements.

curious question: can navigational computers (on planes, though maybe this can be asked about other systems as well) not take an initial position-reading from gps or radio and then compute their location then-on based on internal gyros, compasses, accelerometers, etc.? if outside navigation aids fail, are these systems not capable of internally simulating and determining their own position, or am i underestimating how much compute power this would take?

The FAA is a giant lumbering dinosaur that has done as little as humanly possible to avoid any sort of modernization while drowning General Aviation in paperwork and regulations to protect a buggy-whip avionics and engine manufacturing/maintenance/repair industry, while for decades has failed to effectively address the primary safety issues in GA. Namely controlled flight into terrain and running out of fuel.

Let me give you an example of the idiocy GA pilots face; a relative is a plane-owning pilot.

The attitude indicator in many GA planes is a mechanical gyroscope, driven by vacuum from the engine, a vacuum pump, or a static port on the side of the plane. They are absurdly expensive, high precision devices and they have a huge failure rate. Repairing them is also very expensive. For decades, we've had superior technology: MEMS based accelerometers and rate sensors. Avionics using these sensors are incredibly reliable, very inexpensive, and switching to them is a royal fucking pain in the ass because of all the regulations and paperwork the FAA requires to do it. There's a massive avionics repair industry that has been in buggy-whip status for probably three decades, and the FAA is their little bitch.

He had an engine failure because his mechanic never changed an inexpensive part that was listed as required to be replaced on every maintenance interval. It turns out that despite all the FAA regulations, an aviation mechanic can go "meh, whatever" and ignore the factory repair manual for an aviation engine, even when the manual says "this is required to be done." Furthermore, the shop was listing the work as having been done, which meant they were generating fraudulent paperwork. This was also not against FAA regulations.

So the FAA regulates the fuck out of something like replacing 1940's technology with modern electronics superior in every way, but allows mechanics to fake paperwork and ignore factory repair manuals, and Boeing gets to say "oh yeah, FAA, we totally are doing all the things we're supposed to be doing", the FAA goes "mmm hmm sounds good" and then when four hundred people are killed, exactly nothing happens to Boeing management?

Yes, for example:

10/034 (A0480/21) - NAV GPS (WSMRNM GPS 21-18) (INCLUDING WAAS, GBAS, AND

ADS-B) MAY NOT BE AVBL WI A 445NM RADIUS CENTERED AT 334005N1063216W (ONM148043) FL400-UNL,

399NM RADIUS AT FL250,

329NM RADIUS AT 10000FT,

329NM RADIUS AT 4000FT AGL,

275NM RADIUS AT 50FT AGL.

DLY 0600-1159. 13 OCT 06:00 2021 UNTIL 17 OCT 11:59 2021.

CREATED: 08 OCT 20:45 2021

It would be if flight plans using tango routes through those temporary areas would be rejected.

Not constantly but often.

The US Army and the FAA are two separate entities. The example in the article mentioned that a FAA facility manager might have denied escalation to use the buzzer, not the US Army.

I mean, the article is very clear that it's on-site management that are not allowing controllers to do their job; nowhere in the article do they suggest that the US Army doesn't take it seriously.

"[The] facility manager on duty later informed me we can't ask them to 'stop buzzer' and to just keep putting aircraft on headings,"

Yes GNSS jamming and spoofing can interfere with road navigation. Due to signal propagation limits imposed by the ground and other obstacles the effective range will typically be shorter than with aircraft.

https://money.cnn.com/2016/12/02/technology/kremlin-gps-sign...

The signal GPS uses is actually very very weak and can be jammed pretty easily just by spewing a bunch of noise in the general area of the spectrum where it lies. Military grade receivers have some countermeasures that civilian equipment doesn't (e.g. the military signals have much wider bandwidth to work with, and you can also do some antenna magic), but jamming is still a problem for them too and it's a pretty active area for R&D.

https://www.afcea.org/content/jam-proof-signals-guide-naviga... is a good read on the subject.

Probably the same reason Netflix used/uses Chaos Monkey to actually cause problems, rather than just relying on training aids.

You need to find the problems you didn't anticipate.

Remember, GPS is a military tool first. Civilians get to use it at the militaries discretion. They could turn the selective availability (which was turned off in 2000) back on and remove a lot of civilian accuracy. Maybe civilian pilots are the ones that need to training aids more than the military. It seems to me that they should be able to navigate without gps in a safe manner.

Edit: fixed term for selective availability.

SO the US military is heavily reliant on GPS, and they know it, and so do professionals on the other side. There is a lot of good reason to think that if the US gets into a Large State action, which is relatively unlikely but. . . , then the opposition will employ GPS jamming to negate some of the more smart and collateral damage avoiding systems. I've been out for almost a decade, so I don't know if secondary powers have reliable and ubiquitous GPS jamming capabilities, but I'd bet dollars to donuts IRAN has spent significant funding to acquire GPS jamming. All of this gives a a context for why the military both uses training aids (marker blackout over GPS, manually disabled data links, and whatever more high tech the have devised) and real operate in jamming training, possibly as final training, certification training/exams, if my experience in sibling forces is any guide.

The signals are all rather low power, in very well known frequency bands. That makes jamming them very easy militarily speaking.

If GPS is easy to jam, that doesn't help much. You can likely just as easily jam signals for another GNSS as they all use similar technology.

GPS and Galileo have overlapping frequencies (this is by design) so if GPS is jammed then Galileo probably won't be available either.

GLONASS is historically less accurate and available than GPS (at least at lower latitudes) so I wouldn't be surprised if fewer (or no) aircraft have hardware for it

> There are more navigation systems around: The EU Galileo, Russia's GLONASS, etc.

They all use the same frequency ranges:

* https://gssc.esa.int/navipedia/index.php/GNSS_signal

It's not that difficult to take out multiple services by having the jamming signal be wide enough.

The same kind that shines laser pointers in planes?

The US military, per the article.

The DoD wants to ensure their forces can operate if GPS is down.

This requirement should be reasonable to most people who aren’t pacifists. So I think the real question is, why aren’t senior level DoD and FAA bosses doing more to increase safety during the planned outages?

I shall consult the expert team at 4chan /s

But seriously "We've been told we can't ask to stop jamming, and to just put everyone on headings."... people inbound not ready for this can run out of fuel. Maybe the right passive aggressive response could have been to simply set a really large diameter TFR to keep civilian aircraft away assuming people check NOTAMs.

I think it’s for military protection. I had a flight canceled due to GPS jamming. I think it was to protect a U2 flight. Putin also flies around with GPS jammers.

From the article: "The Pentagon uses its more remote military bases, many in the American West, to test how its forces operate under GPS denial."

Governments messing with other governments?

Well keep in mind that US GPS was developed by and is owned/operated by the US military. They're just letting us use it.

No plane is going to crash because it doesn't have GPS. Aircraft have other ways to navigate.

There was an issue a few years ago in Chicago where planes at the airport were losing GPS reception, which was eventually traced back to a truck driver who used a jammer to avoid fines based on GPS tracker data on the rental trucks he was assigned to drive.

He wasn't intending to crash an airplane, just avoiding docked pay for driving in traffic, using a $50 device bought online, and his route took him past O'Hare.

The perpetrators aren't playing around to try to crash an airplane, they're merely polluting an invisible commons in their own self-interest, and aviation happens to need that spectrum to be clean.