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What’s new: An opinion piece from the United Kingdom about PNT and critical infrastructure, but in an aviation media outlet.
Why it’s important: Everything is related and impacts everything else. For example, airplanes can fly without the electrical grid, but what about runway and airport lighting, air traffic control radios, air search radar, etcetera?
What else to know:
- The UK is implementing a resilient national PNT architecture that includes signals from space, terrestrial broadcast, and a fiber/clock timing network.
- We especially like the following snippet from the piece:
“…the cost of resilience pales in comparison to the cost of inaction.”
If you doubt that, think of the cost of Hurricane Katrina against the cost of making the levees stronger. Or the cost of hardened cockpit doors and a bit more airport security against the cost of 9-11 and all the wars that followed.
Prof Aled Catherall, chief technical officer at Plextek discusses the options available for safeguarding Positioning, Navigation, and Timing systems
The UK, along with every other country globally, is becoming increasingly vulnerable. Our critical national infrastructure is facing an array of escalating threats, including climatic change and the security implications of rising geopolitical tension as identified within the recent Strategic Defence and Security review.
A significant concern is the continued over-reliance on global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) that can be compromised by both natural phenomena and bad actors.
From chemicals to defence, emergency services to finance, food to health, transport to water, effective, resilient critical national infrastructure (CNI) underpins every aspect of life. These industries are highly dependent on the provision of accurate position and timing information – and often that provision is provided by GNSS.
