There are sooo many GPS interference exercises NOTAMed! Here's an animation I made of GPS interference NOTAMS in effect on any given day in the U.S. from 2022 to 2023: https://x.com/lemonodor/status/1722275349554487750

And they affect thousands of aircraft--Here's a thread where I analyze an earlier exercise at White Sands, called NAVFEST: https://bsky.app/profile/lemonodor.bsky.social/post/3ml7afb2...

  * Approximately 4000 aircraft experienced significant GPS interference
  * 90% of which were commercial jets
  * The military appears to have been jamming outside the posted NOTAM hours
    2750 aircraft jammed during the window, 1250 jammed outside the window.
  * Used to be called JAMFEST but "the Joint Spectrum Center became
    uncomfortable with the idea of associating its RFAs with events with the
    word 'jam' in their names."

The problem here is the assumption that if the US mil weren’t jamming GPS it wouldn’t be getting jammed. GPS is trivially easy to jam for any state actor, and it’s not “macho” to say that pilots always need to be able to safely conduct flights in its absence.

> Saying that this situation is what pilots train for and they should have just used VORs and ILS reveals an overly macho, unsophisticated understanding of aviation safety. We've added GPS, ADS-B, TCAS, GPWS, TAWS, etc. because they make flight safer.

We've also added blind spot warnings, but you're still responsible for doing a shoulder check before changing lanes. We have automatic emergency braking, but you need to stay back as well (if it does not work, or if conditions are slippery).

GNSS also tends to be used with glass cockpits, going back to the late 1990s (e.g., Garmin GNS 400/500), which not only did GPS but also VOR/DME. How transparent is getting a fix between the two and still getting good RNAV?

Another thing to add to all this is FAA has been steadily removing from service non-GPS navigation aids.

I wonder what the human factors consequences of having a GPS/chartplotter working almost all the time and then suddenly fail are. Well, I don't wonder that much, but it would be interesting to see the data. It seems a similarly jarring situation to having an AI chatbot that most of the time gets things right but then occasionally gets something wildly (albeit plausibly) wrong. Or self-driving car technology that occasionally (rarely) tries to drive into the median. It seems like it renders the user more complacent and less able or likely to respond to the failure safely and correctly.

So is it safer? If the answer is "yes, until it fails" that's pretty bad. Things fail, systems degrade, and we need to be able to adapt safely. If the transition between "everything working" and "degraded performance" causes a safety issue... that's kind of a systemic failure isn't it?

[edit] maybe it's a UX issue? What if interacting with the GPS had the same UX as the VOR? The failover would be a lot less disruptive. That's kind of where I always end up with chart plotters.. like, you need to be using the paper chart anyway if you want to be able to fail over safely and quickly... so does the chartplotter really add anything? Or does it take things away?

Interesting how neither you nor the article affirm or deny if they plane was flying in restricted airspace either before or during the crash.