NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: GPS jamming concerns
From: Tom Sult
Date: 2016 Aug 10, 08:54 -0500
From: Tom Sult
Date: 2016 Aug 10, 08:54 -0500
This report is not a failure of the GPS system, on board or in the sky. It is a case of Human interface error. This has commonly been call pilot error but the issue is more complicated than that. In this case the crew entered west coordinate instead of east. It would be a simple thing to have the GPS unit ask for confirmation when a waypoint outside of the range of the aircraft is entered. This would have been an improvement to the system interface. And the kind of thing demanded of high reliability organizations.
In fact in the US if a standard departure procedure is not in the GPS data base it is illegal to use it. This is to prevent just this type of error.
Tom Sult, MD
Tom Sult, MD
Author: JUST BE WELL
For example of an incident in which the aircrew relied on GPS, did not do any cross-checking, did not have any positional awareness and became hopelessly lost in the southern ocean have a look at:
http://www.tsb.gc.ca/eng/rapports-reports/aviation/2003/a03f0114/a03f0114.pdf
Fortunately the aircraft landed safely just before the fuel ran out.
