The FAA has issued a flight advisory that GPS reception may be unavailable or unreliable over a large portion of the southeastern states and the Caribbean between Jan. 16 and 24, due to offshore military exercises.
According to FAA officials, the exercises require jamming GPS signals for several hours each day.
Navigation guidance, ADS-B, and other services associated with GPS could be affected for up to 400 nautical miles at Flight Level 400, down to a radius of 180 nm at 50′ above the ground.
The flight advisory encourages pilots to report any GPS anomalies they encounter on this online form.
A report on the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association website notes that the association is “aware of hundreds of reports of interference to aircraft during events around the country for which notices to airmen were issued, and we consider the risks to GA aircraft highly concerning.”
“In one example, an aircraft lost navigation capability and did not regain it until after landing,” says the report from Dan Namowitz. “Other reports have highlighted aircraft veering off course and heading toward active military airspace.”
The wide range of reports makes it clear that interference affects aircraft differently, according to AOPA. In some cases, recovery from signal interference may not occur until well after the aircraft exits the jammed area.
In a January 2019 AOPA survey, more than 64% of 1,239 pilots who responded noted concern about the impact of interference on their use of GPS and ADS-B.
This is why I am keeping my ADF
VOR’s are useless at low altitudes and long distances
Navigating to an AM radio station near you!
So much for this FAA (obsolete, unnecessary, overly expensive, foolish) WAAS LPV mess (now with approaching 100 GNSS SVs globally). Instead FAA should have invested in the combination of RNP (sensor independent with rho-rho radio updating logic included), networks of GLS/GBAS (e.g., via pseudolites), Kalman filtering with low cost inertial in FMSs, …that would not have faced this embarrassing long known potential GPS civil failure mode, even in the face of 1000 year solar flare threats. It could have even been done far less expensive, and vastly better capability as well as more robust, compared with some GA present typical still very expensive WAAS/LPV avionics boxes.