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What's new:

• Swiss officials have a program to disestablish terrestrial Instrument Landing Systems (ILS) at its airports in favor of GPS-based approaches. Pilots have objected, and they are being backed up by the European Union Aviation Safety Authority (EASA).
• While the pilots seem to have prevailed at one airport, ILS systems have already been removed from others and more are on the chopping block.

Note - GPS is the only GNSS currently approved for use in commercial aircraft. The effort to approve and include Galileo has been on-going for years, but because of the lengthy, and some say ponderous, process, it hasn't happened yet.

Why it's important:

We would have expected government aviation authorities to be more knowledgeable and more focused on safety, efficiency, and effectiveness than is apparently the case here. Especially in Switzerland which has a reputation for good government and being willing to spend money on infrastructure and broad societal benefits.

What else to know: 

• GPS and other GNSS were expensive to build and are expensive to maintain. They were sold, in part, with the promise they would eliminate the need for all other navigation and timing systems. We all know how that worked out. Yet government budgeteers still remember the promises and are likely cranky they were lied to. - Yes, lied to. GNSS experts have known since the earliest days of the GPS program that weak, open source signals are exceptionally vulnerable. But "budget warriors" in government agencies sometimes over-sell things, to phrase it mildly.
• Switzerland's bureaucrats are just one example of governments trying to execute plans from long ago that no longer make sense, and/or being willfully ignorant about the limitations of GNSS.
• As a general rule, it seems that many governments are just ignoring safe navigation as a requirement. For example, the BVLOS rules for UAVs in the U.S. have no significant requirements for navigation that we can find.
• We wonder what kind of misinformation such officials and bureaucrats are receiving about GNSS and where it is coming from. For staunchly independent Switzerland, might this be the result of a misinformation campaign to weaken the country by ensuring it remains as vulnerable as possible to GNSS interference? Perhaps officials in many governments are receiving the same mis-information.

Switzerland Is Scrapping ILS as GPS Spoofing Hits Crews Daily