US Flight Traffic Controllers Complain Military Tests Interfered with GPS Signals (ieee.org) 52
IEEE Spectrum reports that air traffic controllers for America's Federal Aviation Administration "were confused and frustrated by an increase in military tests that interfered with GPS signals for civilian aircraft, public records show."
The incidents happened for controllers supervising flights over Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, according to their report (shared by Slashdot reader schwit1): In March and April this year, flight controllers at the Albuquerque Air Route Traffic Control Center filed reports on NASA's Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS), a forum where aviation professionals can anonymously share near misses and safety tips. The complaints accused the FAA of denying controllers permission to ask the military to cut short GPS tests adversely affecting commercial and private aircraft. These so-called "stop buzzer" (or "cease buzzer") requests are supposed to be made by pilots only when a safety-of-flight issue is encountered. "Aircraft are greatly affected by the GPS jamming and it's not taken seriously by management," reads one report. "We've been told we can't ask to stop jamming, and to just put everyone on headings."
In a second report, a private jet made a wrong turn into restricted airspace over the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico after being jammed. On that occasion, the air traffic controller called a stop buzzer. "[The] facility manager on duty later informed me we can't ask them to 'stop buzzer' and to just keep putting aircraft on headings," their ASRS report reads. Putting an aircraft on headings requires giving pilots precise bearings to follow, rather than letting them perform their own navigation using GPS or other technologies. This adds work for controllers, who are already very busy at certain times of day...
The Pentagon uses its more remote military bases, many in the American West, to test how its forces operate under GPS denial. A Spectrum investigation earlier this year discovered that such jamming tests are far more prevalent than had previously been thought, possibly affecting thousands of civilian flights each year.
The incidents happened for controllers supervising flights over Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, according to their report (shared by Slashdot reader schwit1): In March and April this year, flight controllers at the Albuquerque Air Route Traffic Control Center filed reports on NASA's Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS), a forum where aviation professionals can anonymously share near misses and safety tips. The complaints accused the FAA of denying controllers permission to ask the military to cut short GPS tests adversely affecting commercial and private aircraft. These so-called "stop buzzer" (or "cease buzzer") requests are supposed to be made by pilots only when a safety-of-flight issue is encountered. "Aircraft are greatly affected by the GPS jamming and it's not taken seriously by management," reads one report. "We've been told we can't ask to stop jamming, and to just put everyone on headings."
In a second report, a private jet made a wrong turn into restricted airspace over the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico after being jammed. On that occasion, the air traffic controller called a stop buzzer. "[The] facility manager on duty later informed me we can't ask them to 'stop buzzer' and to just keep putting aircraft on headings," their ASRS report reads. Putting an aircraft on headings requires giving pilots precise bearings to follow, rather than letting them perform their own navigation using GPS or other technologies. This adds work for controllers, who are already very busy at certain times of day...
The Pentagon uses its more remote military bases, many in the American West, to test how its forces operate under GPS denial. A Spectrum investigation earlier this year discovered that such jamming tests are far more prevalent than had previously been thought, possibly affecting thousands of civilian flights each year.
Probably shouldn't rely on it (Score:3, Informative)
GPS was made by and for the US military. I don't see any reason why the US military can't use it however they need it.
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GPS was made by and for the US military. I don't see any reason why the US military can't use it however they need it.
So was the Internet. (see: ARPANET [wikipedia.org])
Want to apply your argument/logic to that too?
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Yup. The military can turn off their portion of the internet if they want to. Everyone else might be a bit harder, but then there's what happened to Facebook.
Re: Probably shouldn't rely on it (Score:3)
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And much like Arpanet the government knows it's gone way fast it''s original scope. That's why selective availability was turned off.
Re: Probably shouldn't rely on it (Score:2)
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But unlike arpanet, it is still owned and operated by the Mil.
It is owned by the taxpayers. Jesus.. Fix your thinking. When the military starts paying for shit out of their own pocket, and not mine, they can do whatever they like with their systems.
Re: Probably shouldn't rely on it (Score:2)
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Arpanet was a military project that evolved and was given to civilians. GPS is still operated and maintained by the US Mil. If we want one they are not in control of, we should build one.
WTF? GPS was built with taxpayer money. It may have been for the military, but we own it (in the larger sense).
At this point in time, fucking with GPS accomplishes nothing. The terrorists can always use Beidou, Galileo, GLONASS, or whatever other system is in the works.
I have a low-end smart phone. It can use all 4 of the above-listed GPS systems. So the components can't be very expensive.
Besides, the US has military bases all over the world. Why not do GPS fuckery on a remote Pacific Island so we
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The US military has its own portion of the internet that they can freely cut off from the rest of the internet, if they desire. Most of the internet is owned and run privately, and the US military does not have any domain over private property. The GPS satellites, however, are owned and run by the military.
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Good reason to use everyone elses GPS then since ours is so unreliable.
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Probably. I'm pretty sure the alternatives were created for this exact reason.
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Probably. I'm pretty sure the alternatives were created for this exact reason.
Pretty sure? They were created for this EXACT reason.
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I don't see any reason why the US military can't use it however they need it.
The U.S. military is not a sovereign entity. They are funded by our taxes and what they create belongs to the American people.
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The US military can and does have its own property. Otherwise I could just walk over to Ft Huachuca, hop in an HMMWV, and drive it off. I can't do that because it's government property, as are the GPS satellites.
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I could just walk over to Ft Huachuca, hop in an HMMWV, and drive it off.
You can't do that because the vehicle isn't yours.
Likewise, the commanding general of Fort Huachuca can't drive it off either, because it isn't his.
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Likewise, the commanding general of Fort Huachuca can't drive it off either, because it isn't his.
Sure he could, if he was using it for military purposes. What happens with GPS is no different.
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I don't see any reason why the US military can't use it however they need it.
The U.S. military is not a sovereign entity. They are funded by our taxes and what they create belongs to the American people.
That's correct.
And we, the American people, have elected representatives that authorize the military to use GPS in whatever way the military needs it.
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authorize the military to use GPS in whatever way the military needs it.
The military is not authorized to do whatever they want with GPS.
There are restrictions on how and when the signal can be modified or turned off.
The point of TFA is that the rules need to be tightened.
Re:Probably shouldn't rely on it (Score:5, Informative)
Clinton disabled the GPS jamming/deliberate error features in 1996, so that civilians could rely on it. Subsequently GPS became important for civilian aircraft and ship navigation, and in many countries jamming it is a crime.
As well as location, GPS is also widely used for timing applications. It can deliver sub nanosecond timing for applications like synchronized radio transmissions, and is widely relied on.
Other countries recognized how important GPS has become, and developed their own similar systems like Glonass (Russia), Galileo (EU) and Compass (China).
Jamming remains and issue though, so countries are looking for alternatives. I am actually working on one at the moment, primarily for timing. The old eLoran system is being brought back online and modernized, for example.
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Clinton disabled the GPS jamming/deliberate error features in 1996, so that civilians could rely on it. Subsequently GPS became important for civilian aircraft and ship navigation, and in many countries jamming it is a crime.
Relying on GPS is dumb.
As well as location, GPS is also widely used for timing applications. It can deliver sub nanosecond timing for applications like synchronized radio transmissions, and is widely relied on.
This is even dumber. Even if your plotter knows your position you may not be able to broadcast due to lack of common clocking to communicate. Even dumber still are people who use it for phase sync.
Jamming remains and issue though, so countries are looking for alternatives. I am actually working on one at the moment, primarily for timing.
The reality is things never changed. People still have RLGs, compass, star and sun sighting and fixes to landmarks. All military ships and aircraft training assume GPS denial. Civilian idiots relying on GPS alone for everything who would be completely and utterly lost without it are the
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Problem is, The US Government which controls the US Military gave subsidy discounts on early GPS products, leading to a tech that is in nearly every new car and cell phone. WAAS was set up for highway accuracy and 2-way communication to predict traffic and for tracking.
So, it'd help if SkyLink and such provided a location service based on their fleets of satellites to let GPS be military-only, but right now there's a loud "I WAS USING THAT!" any time GPS goes down in an area.
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Have fun paying through your nose for airplane tickets again so the microwave landing system stations and VOR beacons can be recommissioned.
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So if the argument was that US military can legitimately prevent civillian use of tech they developed, then military radar-jamming would also prevent ATC giving pilots radar-determined headings.
Re: Probably shouldn't rely on it (Score:2)
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GPS was paid for by US taxpayers. If you don't see any reason why they shouldn't be endangered by careless use of it by the military, then you're probably a moron.
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There's also the apparently little-known (!?!) principle of "shit happens." GPS should be thought of as a really neat feature, a cool thing. Not a requirement which, upon breaking, breaks everything else. There are plenty of other ways to navigate; it's not like the world didn't function 50 years ago. Your airplane can and should be able to fly, even if everything in orbit gets fried on some terrible, weird, fateful day.
Every single person who relies on GPS knows they made a decision to rely on something th
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Thats like saying the military made nukes, so they can do anything they like with them, maybe fire a nuke into the middle of NY - just to test it.
On the other hand ... (Score:4, Insightful)
The Pentagon uses its more remote military bases, many in the American West, to test how its forces operate under GPS denial. A Spectrum investigation earlier this year discovered that such jamming tests are far more prevalent than had previously been thought, possibly affecting thousands of civilian flights each year.
Couldn't the military test "GPS denial" simply by disabling GPS on their devices and/or ignoring GPS info/sources rather than actively jamming it?
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Also, it's probably pretty difficult to truly understand how complex networked systems would truly function in the absence of GPS by just pretending it wasn't there.
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To be effective such a test would likely require the military to confiscate personal phones from military personnel, leading invariably to violent mutiny and the end of democracy.
Uh.. No.... Are you for real? There are bases all over the world where you are not permitted to have a personal phone. PERIOD.
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Performing well on training exercises can lead to promotions, so there is an incentive to cheat by using a personal cellphone or whatever.
When I was in the military, we conducted training exercises with sensor harnesses and emitters attached to weapons, similar to laser tag. It was common for Marines to use small pieces of black electrical tape on the sensors. The tape was hard to notice because the sensors were also black.
Smearing a bit of mud on the sensors also worked and had more plausible deniability
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Couldn't the military test "GPS denial" simply by disabling GPS on their devices and/or ignoring GPS info/sources rather than actively jamming it?
Because that's not a real test of what they are trying to achieve. What you are suggesting is that during a GPS denial test you are simply requesting that people ignore their GPS. Sure that may work for some simple training scenarios, but what it doesn't do is actually test what would happen in a real world scenario where they actually need to depend on the jamming occurring.
As an analogy. It's the difference between pointing a gun a a target and saying "bang", vs actually shooting at the target. Whic
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The Pentagon uses its more remote military bases, many in the American West, to test how its forces operate under GPS denial. A Spectrum investigation earlier this year discovered that such jamming tests are far more prevalent than had previously been thought, possibly affecting thousands of civilian flights each year.
Couldn't the military test "GPS denial" simply by disabling GPS on their devices and/or ignoring GPS info/sources rather than actively jamming it?
Not if the testing is to work with intermittent jamming, or is to test devices to detect jamming and counteract or work through it.
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The Pentagon uses its more remote military bases, many in the American West, to test how its forces operate under GPS denial. A Spectrum investigation earlier this year discovered that such jamming tests are far more prevalent than had previously been thought, possibly affecting thousands of civilian flights each year.
Couldn't the military test "GPS denial" simply by disabling GPS on their devices and/or ignoring GPS info/sources rather than actively jamming it?
Not if the testing is to work with intermittent jamming, or is to test devices to detect jamming and counteract or work through it.
Thanks. That's the best reply I've seen so far.
Better keep those VORs running (Score:1)
And on board, have a good old fashion ADF mounted in the panel
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The major problem with ADF was the cost of the high power ADF beacons. Yet nearly every high power AM radio station is more reliable and better monitored and works just as well as a transmitter but are harder to identify since they aren't constantly broadcasting their call signs.
The other problem with ADF is that it likes to point towards thunder storms.
Quite common (Score:4, Insightful)
I know through family that this is pretty common.
If you have a base nearby and they fly planes that have an Electronic Warfare package installed, you can be guaranteed that once or twice a year radio devices just won't work for a few hours. The reason why is that the plane will be flying around and someone on the plane will have accidentally turned on EW or forgotten to turn to it off when re-entering airspace and now they're just "silencing" everything within like a 50 mile radius.
WSMR GPS co-ordinates (Score:5, Informative)
Last weekend I went to the open day at the Trinity nuclear test memorial, that is located on the grounds of the White Sands Missile Range near Socorro NM. The instructions for the open day gave turn by turn directions to the Stallion Gate, and had an explicit note that GPS navigation to the gate can be unreliable. When I saw that I thought "Jeez, what decade are they living in?". But in hindsight that note was probably related to their testing GPS denial in the region.
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Switch your receiver to GLONASS [wikipedia.org]
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Switch your receiver to GLONASS [wikipedia.org]
Glonass isn't even as reliable as GPS.
Resiliency (Score:2)
It really sounds like solutions for navigation resiliency need to be identified, though theyâ(TM)d probably need to be more in the visual part of the spectrum, to avoid non-visible jamming.
I imagine in this scenario the jamming would have impacted GLONAS, Galileo and beacon signals too?
Or you could (Score:2)
Use GPS as a backup instead of a primary means of navigation. GPS can be taken offline by space weather, we shouldn't rely on it and always have a backup
Interesting experiment ... (Score:2)
put simple fixed location devices that just recorded their position according to GPS and recorded it.
Most of the time they would always record the same location. When something was jamming or other wise messing with the GPS signal the devices would record something different than their known physical locations.
With enough coverage someone could use the data to build a map of not just where the jamming was but how severe and how much it messed up the location data.
Can't really use public cell phone data sin
And civilian should too (Score:2)
Civilian ATC better learn how to operate in an environment of GPS denial also, at least until all flights can reach the ground, preferably at an airport. It's only a matter of time until a bad actor jams GPS. China for sure either has that capability in place or is working hard to get it, probably via satellites.
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Civilian ATC better learn how to operate in an environment of GPS denial also, at least until all flights can reach the ground, preferably at an airport. It's only a matter of time until a bad actor jams GPS. China for sure either has that capability in place or is working hard to get it, probably via satellites.
They have a backup. Used to be we had NDBs or non directional beacons. That's an AM radio. Like what used to be in cars. They still exist I think. Then there is the VOR/ILS. That's 1950s technology. Very robust. If I were flying a plane and lost GPS that's what I'd use to get down. The bad part is only big airports still have VOR/ILS approaches. Some places in the country that could be a challenge to find one if you're low on fuel.
I think the last time I flew VOR was in 2017 and that was for fun. I wanted t