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Comment by ShakataGaNai | Hacker News Reader

> but if GPS went off with the rest of the government, would Congress reach a resolution faster?

Oh hell yes. GPS is the basis of trillions of dollars of business globally. Just look at sea shipping and aviation alone. Would a lack of GPS ground every commercial plane? Maybe.. maybe not... but it certainly would be a huge disruption.

The first time it happens everyone would just drive hard to making sure all "GPS" systems were actually multi-system GNSS systems. Which is already true of most consumer phones, but I imagine there are still plenty of GPS-Only stuff out there. After the first GPS shutdown and the time for retrofit, everyone would have support for Galileo etc... and the Europeans would be standing there going "SEE!!!! I told you we can't trust the Americans!". And they'd be right.

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Transportation is the backbone of global economy.

Planes, ships, cars, trucks, food delivery - it would be a humongous impact.

GPS is pure magic from the perspective of someone a few centuries ago.

it wouldn't just disrupt planes, it would crash planes if this were not even planned as a contingency. as a senior operations manager for a global logistics company, I was actually not even aware of this being a possibility until TIL here

> it wouldn't just disrupt planes, it would crash planes if this were not even planned as a contingency.

It would not. Aircraft have other navigation systems they can use instead, such as inertial reference and ground-based VOR navigation. And where there's radar coverage, they can be vectored by controllers.

This probably couldn't be used to keep up with the volume of air traffic today, but it would be enough to get existing flights down safely.

For landing, ILS is still very common, and doesn't require GPS either. An aircraft planning to land at an airport without ILS will have no trouble finding a nearby diversion airport that does have it.

Even as more ground-based navigation beacons are decommissioned, retaining enough for such an emergency remains an active consideration.

To my knowledge planes don't use the gps for very much, and AFAIK they use the barometric altimeter for maintaining their flight level. A controllable, plane that can maintain altitude is difficult to crash. The GPS stuff is mostly supplemental and is relatively new.

And pilots can land with a visual approach and still have ILS.

You would still have ADSB with your altitude, and I beleive heading and airspeed.

Because of the existing requirement to be spotting traffic and being over 1000ft away from other planes, they should be fine.

ATC should still have radar vectoring for their airspace.

I assume planes use more then just GPS, and use galileo and the other networks like consumer GPS do.

GPS is used a lot to figure where planes are but I think they are still not allowed to rely in it as it's not considered reliable enough by the regulators. At least not for things like altitude settings and instrument landings.

For light aircraft getting lost in the old days one hack used to be to fly low till you came to a motorway and read the signs. I imagine most such pilots these days would pull out their phone and open the maps app. Commercial flights of course have more high tech stuff like radio beacons.

I'm pretty sure all GPS receivers now are multisystem. So GLONASS and Baidu will continue to serve you

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