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Submitted via IRC for Bytram
Could the world cope if GPS stopped working?
What would happen if GPS - the Global Positioning System - stopped working?
For a start, we would all have to engage our brains and pay attention to the world around us when getting from A to B. Perhaps this would be no bad thing: we'd be less likely to drive into rivers or over cliffs through misplaced trust in our navigation devices.
Pick your own favourite story about the kind of idiocy only GPS can enable. Mine is the Swedish couple who misspelled the Italian island of Capri and turned up hundreds of miles away in Carpi, asking where the sea was.
But these are the exceptions.
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Could the World Cope If GPS Stopped Working?
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When God saw how faulty was man He tried again and made woman. As to
why he then stopped there are two opinions. One of them is woman's.
-- DeGourmont
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 10 2019, @05:33AM
At least in the US, there are a lot of the old navigation beacons (VORs) still in service, just in case of something like this happening. The other kind of beacons, NDB, have been retired - these were mostly used for instrument approaches anyway although it was possible to navigate with them in a pinch.
The real problem for aviation is that air traffic would mostly have to switch back to the old "highways in the sky" as opposed to being able to just go wherever they want, greatly increasing traffic congestion. (You don't have to use the "sky highways" if you have the right equipment "RNAV" or are not on instrument flight plan, but airliners have to use instrument flying and most don't have the RNAV equipment any more).