Posted on 12/16/2004 7:04:56 AM PST by crushelits
WASHINGTON - President Bush has ordered plans for temporarily disabling the U.S. network of global positioning satellites during a national crisis to prevent terrorists from using the navigational technology, the White House said Wednesday.
Any shutdown of the network inside the United States would come under only the most remarkable circumstances, said a Bush administration official who spoke to a small group of reporters at the White House on condition of anonymity.
The GPS system is vital to commercial aviation and marine shipping.
The president also instructed the Defense Department to develop plans to disable, in certain areas, an enemy's access to the U.S. navigational satellites and to similar systems operated by others. The European Union is developing a $4.8 billion program, called Galileo.
The military increasingly uses GPS technology to move troops across large areas and direct bombs and missiles. Any government-ordered shutdown or jamming of the GPS satellites would be done in ways to limit disruptions to navigation and related systems outside the affected area, the White House said.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
I learned to fly before it was so common. I got lost once over western Tennessee during some high winds and found out why a lot of old buildings have the name of the town on their roofs. Thank God for that and ADF. Unfortunately TVA transmission lines play hell with ADF.
I thought it was the CAVU - They could probably see where the buildings were from 60 miles out.
"What did pilots use, say, fifty years ago? Are they not still trained in a more basic navigation system?"
IFR - I Follow Roads.
It's not nearly that simple. At the very least the autopilot must be linked to an altitude control system in order to cause the AC to come down in the right place. Most such systems cannot be pre-programmed. They must be enabled by the pilot at the beginning of the descent. And they don't control *where* the AC hits a certian altitude, unless they're flying a pre-programmed GPS-ILS to a runway.
And it's not nice to give people ideas like this. I'm not talking about the terrorists, they've already thought about this. I'm talking about the thousands of bureaucrats in DC who don't have a technological clue. They are the one's liable to start threatening GPS shutdowns, which will be very damaging to the economy. You have no idea how many billions of dollars depend on this technology.
Local area jammers will protect DC. Leave the rest of the system intact.
It would take out way more than that. See:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1302340/posts?page=93#93
This is a nifty technology that has wonderful civillian applications, but in my opinion, it probably should never have been expanded beyond the domain of the military.
You can thank Will Rogers for that. He wrote an article sometime in the early 30's asking towns to paint their names on water towers and roof tops so pilots could find out where they were. He offered to buy the paint for all those that would, but was inundated with requests for paint money so he had to back off the offer.
Codswallop!
Go on. This is a discussion forum, you know.
It is always a mistake, sometimes a fatal mistake, to underestimate your enemy. These Islamonazis may be crazy, but they aren't dumb.
Do you really think this is some type of new idea, using GPS to steer terrorist weapons? You need to get out more. You sound like the bureaucrats who had "no idea" about using jetliners as weapons, a few years after Tom Clancy had a best seller with a 747 plunging into the Capitol during the State of the Union address.
You'd thing THAT scenario (by the country's most famous author in a best seller) would have woken up sleeping bureaucrats prior to 9-11, but I guess it didn't.
So no, I don't worry about "the wrong people" getting the idea. They already know. I'm much more concerned with waking up sleeping idiots like Norm Mineta.
GPS is much bigger than just some nifty little toy. Check other posts on this thread and the others that linked this same article to the various industries that would be destroyed/damaged if they took down GPS. It's undoubtedly several billions in the economy now and growing.
GPS technology will become ubiquitous, like the computer and Internet you're using right now. It's at about the "DOS 3.1" era right now. Taking down GPS would be analogous to confiscating every PC in 1984, just because we discovered the Red Chinese were using it to design military equipment. I.E. it would be a stupid move.
And besides, the Euros are launching Galileo, their version of GPS, and the Russians already have GLONASS, which has several satellites down, but is still marginally usable. If we damage GPS by making it "unreliable" for people to use because we might get a hair and turn it off, the US will loose it's virtual monopoly on the positioning market.
The very fact that GPS is global and can be relied upon is actually a defense advantage. If virtually all equipment uses GPS signals, rather than Galileo or GLONASS, then we can have an effect if we really must turn it off. If however we cry wolf and threaten to take it down (like this article does), then equipment using Galileo and GLONASS will proliferate. If we then took down GPS, it wouldn't effect the bad guy, who would more likely use the other signals, or use redundancy.
OK, but what did, say, DC-7 transatlantic pilots use? A compass? And then VFR after they hit land?
I'm really curious...
How smart do you have to be to buy a $100 GPS receiver from Wal-mart?
That said, they don't have the technology to truly use GPS as a guidance system. It only tells you where you are.
I agree, I've read that Atta Visted the towers the Sept 10.
Walk up, set waypoint, Hijack airplane, follow the arrow. My Garmin does this and it cost about $200 bucks.
One thing of note, the front windscreen in a cockpit has a laminent on it, so a side window has to be used.
They used IFBR rules - I Fly By Roads. ;)
Those are exactly the people I do not want woken up. Bereaucrats have a tendency to panic and do more damange than they prevent. We came perilously close to killing the entire General Aviation industry in this country after 9/11. Now they're threatening this kind of stupidity.
Trying to prevent terrorism by punishing law abiding people is never the answer. It's not the answer in gun laws, and it's not the answer in GPS or General Aviation. The bad guys will always have alternatives. Even if we bring the economy down to cave man standards, they will still have big rocks to kill with.
If we killed GPS, high end aircraft already use sophisticated nav systems that triangulate multiple VOR/Loran/NDB signals to generate near-GPS like precision. So shutting down GPS wouldn't stop a terrorist. Actually, the best chance of doing so would be to actually enable them to use GPS, but detect their attack early and jam GPS signals locally. If we shut GPS down now, they will just design their system with alternatives that might be harder to jam.
As I said, the problem with aviation autopilots are that they can't be programed exactly *where* to come down. At least without re-writing software.
See my post 53 for more.
Also: how we gonna track terrorists that we know about if we can't use GPS trackers in their cars? GPS is a positive for handling terrorists, not a negative.
Over open water, I believe they used dead reconing. We had a Lockheed Constelation in a museum I used to work with that had a "drift" system where they could look down at water to determine ground speed and drift angle. Also, it had a bubble window in the top for a sextant.
That and a full time navigator is all you need.
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