Several years ago, when satellites were being touted as aviation’s sole means of navigation from takeoff to touchdown, former FAA Administrator Langhorne Bond painted a picture of a dark winter’s night with below-limits weather up and down the east coast. In that scenario, he stated, terrorist GPS jammers could become “weapons of mass destruction.” The FAA shrugged it off as unfounded speculation. But in a recent report on the GPS-dependent ADS-B, the DOT’s Inspector General took the matter much more seriously, calling on the FAA to “work with the U.S. intelligence community to assess such potential threats.”
Surprisingly, therefore, it now turns out that today, the most likely carriers of these weapons of mass destruction are the good ol’ boys and gals driving the country’s 18-wheeler fleet. How come? Blame it on the ubiquity of GPS, and its ever expanding applications. Almost all big trucks now carry small GPS receivers atop their cabs, along with companion cellphones, that allow company dispatchers to monitor progress without talking with the driver.
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