Redundancy is the best policy.
Lt. Alex Reardon
US Naval Academy instructor.
And by redundancy I don’t think he means two GPS units! The US Navy, who has long relied on GPS and electronic mapping for all navigation needs, is now going to start spending valuable teaching time on something really old school—sextants and celestial navigation.
I’m not suggesting we all start leaning how to shoot the stars (something that remained an airline skill up to the first B747s), but the idea that we can continue to fly should we have total loss of GPS and electronic nav is strong. We need to know fundamental navigation skills, compass operations, situational awareness of our position in space. Are you really ready?
The Navy knows it’s not just Chinese hackers or electromagnetic pulses they have to worry about. A bad fire on board will do it. The USS Guardian went aground on a World Heritage site coral reef near the Philippines due in part to a digital chart that misplaced the obstacle and its navigation team relying “exclusively on electronic fixes derived from GPS” to guide them while failing to heed lighthouses. Ouch.