I’d bet a lot of money that the NTSB will determine that the pilots’ failure to maintain clearance from terrain during a visual approach will be the primary cause with contributing factors of dark, moonless night and GPS jamming.
replyThat one’s going to be on the flight crew, not the GPS jamming test.
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49181099
I'm not going to argue that as it's always easy to blame dead people, but there's two different types of jamming.
replyOne is to actually jam the signal IOW preventing reception. The other is to overpower the satellites' signals and replace them with your own. That defeats the doppler calculations of GPS needed for triangulation, and instead the receiver believes it's where the jammer wants it to be.
If the latter includes altitude information, then it's a huge problem.
I believe it’s been made public that this was a jamming test, not a spoofing test.
replyIf you overpower a signal, is there a difference? I'm not saying you're right or wrong here. I'm just saying there's a long history of coverups in the government and military.
replyIf you can say, "oh we were only jamming" when in fact you were spoofing, well that's certainly a super easy excuse to hide behind.
In either case, asking for and being cleared for a visual approach (as the crew did and was) puts the onus on them to maintain continuous visual contact with the airport and to maintain their own terrain and obstacle clearance, which it’s safe to say they didn’t do.
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