Posted by dzdt 3 days ago
Individual GPS signals typically arrive at the antenna below the receiver’s thermal noise floor and the system relies on processing gain in the receiver to generate a fix.
It's not fun to lose GPS, but, a trained pilot ought to have been able to handle this situation fine. All instruments can fail, but weather notwithstanding, no instruments are required to land a plane back down on a runway (implied in my statement is that, if you lose all your instruments, you should still try to land rather than continue your flight).
At the end of the day, if you aren't proficient in VFR, then your IFR proficiency doesn't mean much. Hopefully this pushes the relevant flight schools to do more training, because this crash appears highly avoidable - and while the pilots take some amount of blame since they are behind the controls, there are also people who failed them by not giving them sufficient training.
It's hammered into pilots that safe and legal are two different things, and you must evaluate whether the conditions are something that you can actually handle safely, not merely whether you're legal to fly in them.
I have thousands of hours as pilot in command and have worked as a professional pilot.
Unlit terrain is invisible at night. The moon was new. They did not see, and could not have seen, the mountains.
Back when i used to sail, taking bearings with a sighting compass on two points on land / two buoys always gave you a fairly accurate position. Not sure if there is a sighting compass equivalent with elevation angle too on planes?
Roswell.
Blaming GPS jaming and the military? What about the aliens?
* https://futurism.com/science-energy/us-military-gps-jamming-...