AAIB Comment in Clued Up
 

In the 2012 edition of Clued Up, the CAA GA safety magazine there is a quote from the AAIB, "Some of the more common, and preventable, incidents involve poor situational awareness, largely as a result of the overuse of GPS."

Discuss

SND

Hat, coat, TAXI!!:E

Define "overuse"

AAIB statement, they're definition whatever it may be.

SND

Unarguably true, surely.

"Some" means "more than none, but maybe less than all". So as long as you accept that that description applies to at least one incident you're agreeing with the statement.

Was talking to an ATC recently and he made an interesting comment.

If he asks for a position report from a light aircraft and he gets a very precise answer of x.x nm on a bearing of y° from z, or even a lat/lon then he can guess the person on the other end of the radio is a GPS junkie. His comment was that GPS often means that the PIC becomes less dependent on visual navigation and more on a little dot on the screen. There are obviously exceptions to this rule but he is much more confident in the ability of someone who instantly gives him a rough, but accurate estimate of their position based on a visual lookout.

Situational awareness counts for a lot and it could be argued that GPS causes a reduction in that if relied on too closely.

One loses the will to live. What century is this?

He was pulling your leg. He's not an ATCO.

A GPS is not going to give you " a bearing of y° from z," and no pilot is ever going to read out lat/long (that's just stupid).

The rest of his comments........ one loses the will to live.

I must remember to give rough but accurate position reports from now on :ugh:

Think about it :ugh:(how does the ATCO know it is accurate?)

Unless I get a DME reading, I always use the word approximately. But yes, I agree with what you're saying.

"...approximately 5 miles south of Grays..."

I think using a GPS does not equal poor situational awareness. As most of us know, it can actually increase situational awareness.

But using the GPS so much that it gets to the point that you cannot operate without it because of lack of confidence or you have no clue about your surroundings...then that's over use.

Never flown with a GPS though, usually just look out the window.

So you are only up to one more pro/against gps argument?

One gets so tired, indeed.

Well if I had a pound for every aircraft that told me he was 6.7 nm south of DCS I would be a rich ATC person!!!...:cool:

Peter

If you put it in OBS mode you should get a bearing of Y from Z

I think we are all guilty with GPS of just loading the points at the start of the flight and then blindly jumping from one point to the other without really following where we are!

When we had VORS you worked harder often out of range and getting bearings to position place from VOR/DME and even NDBs off track so there maybe some truth in the fact that pilots were more aware of their surroundings in the past as well as a lot more chart plotting and following!

Pace

:confused:

So, we should only use GPS for 50% of our trip and that will make us better/safer pilots?!!

Even if he meant 'reliance', I think it's a load of tosh. We all use technology extensively every day - nowt wrong with that :*

ToptoBottom

Maybe but on occasion it does do no harm to jump into an old girl! a bit worn around the edges with little working.
Does not half make you sweat a little! Good for the soul old boy!

I am of course only referring to old aircraft :E

Pace

Pace - I realise one can get bearings to a navaid using a GPS but I think very few people know how to do that, and it is fairly pointless anyway since ATC almost never ask for a VOR relative position report. I've had Solent ask for such, maybe twice in 10 years.

Now, tell me... :E

Back to AAIB, I really thought those

http://www.toysandlearning.co.uk/pro...hosaurus-p.jpg

had retired by now, but maybe they have found a new reservoir from which to recruit, uncontaminated by any form of modern aviation :)

With the sky full of Cirruses slowly descending on their chutes, with the pilots desperately trying to reconfigure their GPS to see why their GS reading is so low, recruiting people loyal to The Great Cause must be their most challenging task these days.

I am totally with peterh on this one, and i know he is a long supporter of gps.

I dont know the exact context of the quote and therefore with caution it appears the sort of sound bite which you would hope such an august body would avoid without sound evidence.

Its a little like the already age old debate on chutes, they are and will be misused, just as gps will be misused and abused; doesnt mean its the devil work however, and more importantly fails to recognise just how far in advances flight safety.

Fuji

With all my Goading on the Chute thing :E Where am I best and cheapest renting 20 hrs on a Cirrus without someone wanting me to cough up £4200 for a conversion ;)
And no I do not need 10 hrs training to fly one 1 hr maybe :E No wait a minute with the chute 30 minutes will do.

Pace

I do wonder if in todays GPS reliant world we have become too reliant on GPS, with the Olympics weeks away are we going to see even more use of GPS jamming "trials" as have NOTAM'd recently?

Jamming includes spoofing to offset a real position by many miles

An interesting article:

Over-reliance on GPS poses security risk, warn experts | Infrastructure | ZDNet UK

GEP

I am sure we have become too reliant on GPS to such an extent that many no longer flight plan but jump in and go.

Of course GPS has massive safety benefits and accuracy which was not around pre GPS.

We had the miracle of RNAV being able to drop a VOR right on your track meant we could fly direct to VORS rather than taking cross cuts to get a position.

Then there was the accuracy problem of VORS at a distance and getting cross cuts off NDB beacons and pure dead reckoning and wind compensation.

Pilots used charts far more and were more aware of where they were.
With GPS and the wonderful displays which go with them I know some who do not even bother with charts anymore! Get up and go!
Decca came out and then GPS. Originally warnings that the USA could switch us down at any time!

Now GPS is everywhere in our cars, on hiking expeditions, on boats and in aircraft.

Even mobile phones can place our position with accuracy.
No excuse to get lost nowadays but no challenge either :{
Now we have parachutes to lower us to the ground and even a button to recover the aircraft if we loose control.

What next? You want need pilots or not any with any skills just turn up to the airport and let the aircraft take you and yours for a tour of wherever automatically

Pace

It's analageous to GPS in cars. Some drivers rely on these devices to the extent that they have no situational awareness, and you get ludicrous situations like someone travelling between two Essex towns 20 miles apart finding themselves passing Northhampton on the M1 because they put the wrong data into the Sat Nav.

Hopefully, pilots aren't that daft, but the device if over-relyed on can and will reduce situational awareness. For VFR cross country flying the GPS is a very useful aid and I always carry one. But I also carry a chart with my track marked on it and that way I actually know where I am (most of the time!).

Using a GPS gives you much better capacity for visual look out and monitoring the performance of the airplane, in my experience.

Trying to follow a line on the map with a stop watch, I tend to spend most of the time staring at the map, trying to relate it to ground features.

I'd like to understand the background for the AAIB comment - what exactly are they getting at? Meanwhile NATS are promoting GPS use for safety.

The aware will give range and distance from the nearest aerodrome (or navaid as well? I haven't used it for ages). Thats supposed to be a feature to aid position reporting in an emergency. I can't see anything wrong with that. Maybe ATC would prefer "south east England" or "northern hemisphere" instead?

An over reliance on lift causes accidents as well. ;)

RAIM is baro-aiding and works (in general) only if you are receiving only (IIRC) 3 satellites. If you are receiving "loads" then it doesn't do anything.

If they jam GPS then London will be jammed with lost drivers... that really will be fun.

One should not equate a lack of "gadget proficiency" with the use of GPS. You can suffer from the former with any piece of nontrivial avionics, if you don't read the manual and/or try to do something odd during the flight.

The wording is daft.

If they complained about "over-reliance on a single means of navigation" it would make more sense.

Taking any two out of map-crawling, VORs, NDBs, GPS and DR should allow the basic cross-checking you need for safe navigation. I can't understand why they single out GPS. Perhaps pilots over-rely on GPS more than the other things, but the error is to over-rely on any single thing.

Peter, didn't you learn anything trudging through the IR TK? ;)

It's a minimum of five satellites for a 3D fix and RAIM, six with the above and FDE.

Oh well there you are :)

I did that stuff a year ago... Although without looking it up in the KLN94 manual I wouldnt be too sure.

Just read the Clued Up mag article. That comment is just a bit of a throwaway remark, out of surrounding context. Stupid all the same. Even NATS, fed up with hundreds of major CAS busts a year, sponsored that £150 GPS box...

GPS can be used for lots of legitimate functions. However it can also be used to guide things which might have more sinister intent. Remove the GPS or spoof its position and then you have plugged one hole. WHO cares about a driver getting lost, pilots are being warned to not be over reliant upon it. READ between the lines with respect to the Olympic months, it's not something that takes a rocket scientist to work out.

From a notam a few weeks ago (Plot the Arc out and see the extents)Peter - in the past you have argued it could not happen and would not be allowed to happen, it has and I suspect during the Olympic period will be used at random times and possibly (due to operational neccesity) will be deployed without warning

Last week there was a trial which radiated 75nm radius from Sennybridge...

GPS spoofing was the claimed method of interception of an American UAV last year - it went into landing mode because it thought it was 2000nm from its true position and was back at its home base and thus entered autonimous recovery mode (no pilot intervention)

Not far off getting an iPad with Sky Demon (funds permitting)... but..

If I'm VFR I will still look out of the window and apart from looking for traffic will check that I am where I think I am from time to time..

If I'm IFR I will still have all the boxes on, tuned, idented and check that what they are telling me agrees with the GPS

If there seems to be a disagreement then I'll do something about it!

Why would I not use all of the information I have available?

Don't banks make use of GPS to timestamp transactions? I wonder if the jamming will affect payment systems?

Of course, I am sure every UK bank has taken the proper precautions.

:E

Meldex

ONLY via NOTAMS....... how much more official would you like, I presume you are not a pilot so do not understand the notam system?

If I may presume to say so, I think that Meldex may be asking whether there has been any "general" pre-notam indication that GPS jamming will take place. I have not personally heard of any statements of that nature, and the effects of it anywhere near the restricted or prohibited zones would, I would have thought, led to infringement armageddon and carnage and aircraft wreckage all over the streets of London.

That would be quite clever since the UAV would be using military encrypted GPS signals... not the civilian signals.

I think the AAIB is infected with the same attitude against GPS as some in the CAA. Old retired airline pilots and ex Military navigators, with little operational knowledge of the subject.
Personally I would not stray far from my base in the London area without GPS, in anything other than good VMC, for the enhanced situational awareness it gives.
The recent advent of cheap, IPad based, GPS moving map displays is one of the greatest navigation airsafety advances in recent years.

Thats quite an assumption Peter!!!

Can you tell us the actual details of the incident? To be helpful I will give you a clue, the UAV was not using M code data at the time of the incident.

We have touched some precious GPS nerves... I'll add some more petrol. GPS should be banned from light aircraft. A chart, clock and pencil is all that is required. Enhanced situational awareness - spare me! That's what the chart is for - and it doesn't require power. Just fly the (sensible) heading and time and you won't be far off.

They bloody well are. When GPS first came out in the UK, it didn't take long for the first victims to arrive. I've shepherded a few out of the Luton zone when I was flying a tug out of LCG at Dunstable. One was due to flat batteries, the other was finger trouble. Both had charts and working radios, but wasn't enough for these two.

PM

Evidently whoever wrote that one-liner is, but I would have seriously thought that the old guard would have moved on by now, retiring to their rightful fine china teacups at the Royal Institute of Navigation.

Let's face it - they must get more than adequate exposure to modern avionics in the wreckage which they pull the remains out of. They must wonder what all those LCD displays are showing.

Absolutely so.

If one wanted to be useful one could say that a route should be planned as far as possible to be VOR/DME-navigable, flown 100% using a GPS, and then you have an instant drop-down backup. That is what I do when flying VFR (though often a VOR-radial route is not viable). But PPL training isn't like that. It is possible that a good IMCR instructor might suggest to a new IMCR holder that from now on, every flight is planned as "IFR"; that was suggested to me in 2002 and it's obviously a great idea.

I don't think so. Bank transactions are generally handled by (or through?) computers, computers generally get their date and time information through an internet protocol called NTP. True, some NTP servers use GPS receivers as their source of information, but some are far away and some do not use GPS at all, like caesium clocks. And yes, these protocols do know how to deal with propagation delays.

The AAIB and the CAA do actually have a point and they are NOT blamimg the spanner they are criticising the mechanic.

We have seen lots of people with road based GPS being "over reliant "or following it blindly resulting in cars in rivers, trucks where no truck should be and the like.

Airborne GPS is no different. If you follow the magenta line and have no idea where you are or what the surrounding terrain and airspace is like then you are a plonker.

That's true but driving is not a comparable situation to flying, for a whole pile of fairly obvious reasons. On the road, take your eyes off the road for a few seconds and you may be dead. The whole scenario is different. And yes a % of drivers are truly completely stupid and some evidently will drive a car into a river. But given the crap databases of many driving units, one can easily get led down the wrong street and then you get some d1ck who is tailgating you who knows the area well getting all hot under the collar :) Satnav is actually really crap; the other week I was in a hire car in Germany, in close to zero vis due to heavy rain, and the satnav just kept taking us back to the same road which was closed due to roadworks. Obviously the locals behind us were going nuts... I am sure every driver can relate to that. Serious commercial travellers have high-end solutions for that kind of thing and they aren't cheap. I was lucky; I had a passenger who was able to work out how to work the satnav.

There are certain specific things which are less than smart to be doing with an aviation GPS e.g. entering waypoint coordinates using lat/long numbers, or using user waypoints in a unit which is in a shared aircraft ;)

But any GPS with a moving map that depicts the general area makes it awfully hard to get lost.

OTOH the other day I did a search on Ebay for used Pooleys Guides (just as a joke, for a presentation I was doing, where I wanted to make a point about flying with current data) and I counted 17 of them, mostly several years old (which translates to several hundred UK PPLs flying with massively out of date Pooleys i.e. a few % of the pilot population) so I suppose there are people out there stupid enough to fly with a £50 GPS from Millets which gives you zero situational awareness.

In that case the issue isn't the GPS (which is prob99.99999 doing its job) but you just have a pretty good proof that common sense is not a requirement for getting a PPL.

I always tell people to buy a nice big GPS, not the little ones. With a decent big GPS it is virtually impossible to get lost.

But the whole training environment is pretty poor and carries on being pretty poor, and not everybody has the benefit of knowing somebody who can provide a bit of mentoring. When I did my IMCR (2002) we used 2 planes, both PA28s, one with a working ADF but a duff DME and the other with a good DME and a duff ADF. The instructor (a CPL/IR who later got a job flying commuter turboprops) was ever so proud of his £50 GPS which he got in the USA for £20 less than they were in the UK (and he told everybody about that) set the airport as a DCT and used the GPS as a "DME" and read out the numbers to me when I was learning NDB approaches. What is the moral of the story? In 2012, such a student should perhaps ask his school for a 50% refund :E

Loads of easy ammo for those looking for an example.

What they forget is that if you get the proverbial interview at Gatwick without tea and biscuits, they won't give you any credit for pulling out a CRAP-1 and a beautiful handwritten plog.

????

My homebrew gps has ALL its waypoints defined as lat/long numbers and seems to work pretty fine. Or have I just been lucky to get to my VRP's and destinations time and again?

Come to think of it, what other better way is there to define waypoint coordinates, besides lat/long numbers?

Buy a GPS with the waypoints in the database.

The only time I have used user defined waypoints for enroute data was in 2003 for the position of LEAX.

And how would you think the waypoints are defined in the database? Lat/long numbers, any chance? Or do you imply a database one paid for is more reliable because of the amount one paid for it? I'am afraid I am missing something somewhere.