Former FAA Administrator Langhorne Bond voiced concerns about the “notorious” doctrine of sole-means GPS dependency before international attendees at the U.S. Air Traffic Control Association’s summer meeting in Dublin, Ireland, in late July.
Bond, an outspoken critic of the FAA’s apparent lack of interest or policy toward providing redundant aviation systems backup over the long term, pointed out that the three elements of ATC–communications, navigation and surveillance–should be independent of each other, so that “a failure of one would not bring down the others.”
But this is no longer the case, he stated, since all three will be GPS dependent (both FAA’s Nexcom VHF and ADS-B surveillance transponders will require GPS to function), which means that “a well coordinated terrorist attack on GPS in the U.S., and indeed in most countries of the world, can collapse most or all of the entire ATC system.”
