Originally Posted by wanabee777
Do you fellas have any opinion as to whether or not it would be advantageous for aircraft to use GPS generated altitudes as opposed to the long standard use of flying atmospheric pressure patterns (ie barometric based altitudes)?
Call me old-fashioned, but I personally would be more than a tad nervous about using a traffic separation system where the inherent error associated with my estimated ("probable") altitude can vary significantly, depending on a) what satellites my GPS receiver happens to be using at the time, and b) what lattitude I happen to be flying at (and ditto for all other aircraft in the vicinity).
How about low orbit spaceflight?
Take a stopwatch, time your orbital period, plug that time into Kepler's 3rd Law. Simples.
