Replies

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.

8

I'm not as familiar with aviation GPS, but with marine GPS, you absolutely can buy off the shelf equipment which interfaces GPS and the autopilot, and will steer a boat (laden with explosives or drugs) exactly where you want it to go. In fact, drug smugglers now use very stealthy unmanned "semi submersibles" guided by GPS to send loads all the way from the Caribbean to the Bahamas for pickup. A quiet yacht diesel motors the semi-submersible along its days-long voyage from waypoint to waypoint. The exhaust is vented underwater. Seawater flowing over the craft masks the IR signature. They can and do drive right past CG cutters unseen. They are usually only found by accident.

If this is SOP already for drug smugglers, do you think terrorists have not heard of it?

Now, if we can only wake up the bureaucrats.

Now, if we can only wake up the bureaucrats.

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.