I still wonder why we have to rely on ground-based ILS. With the high horizontal precision that GPS provides, isn't there adequate computing power to calculate 1) a virtual localizer and glideslope extending from any runway, 2) how many "dots" off the airplane is and 3) display that on a conventional crossed-needle display? If Microsoft Flight Simulator can do it for desktop computer simulations and a CAE simulator can do it for certifiable pilot training, why not for real airplanes? Isn't something like it already done for RNAV constant-descent final approaches? It could even do autopilot-coupled gently curved final approaches for awkward terrain, obstacles and noise abatement but maybe not autoland, just yet. Think how many GA and regional airports could get a precision approach to minimums to improve safety without the huge and currently prohibitive infrastructure and recurrent maintenance costs of ILS and no additional pilot training for new technology, just the development and cert cost of a Synth-ILS box with integrity monitoring and redundancy. Assuming of course, there is no GPS spoofing/jamming. Would eliminate risk of capturing false glideslopes and distortion due to ground vehicles, taxiing airplanes and snow buildup. Would help if the military made precise GPS available, the current dither doesn't provide much security, drop it.
As an old retired 767 pilot I am amazed at the advances in navigation. However the old ones weren't too bad. Back in the days before GPS we relied on IRS for long range nav. It updated automatically using ground aids before going over water. It never ceased to amaze me when after a few hours over water, arriving over a long/lat reporting point, we could see another aircraft directly overhead or below at the exact same spot. Cheers,, Peter
Hey Petter, the most amazing thing happened today. I am a primary school teacher (ages 5-12) in a public (gov owned) school Sydney, Australia. I current teach science to all grades from Kindergarten to Year 6. Today I taught a Year 4 (10yo). We were discussing reliable sources to use online, including TH-cam channels. I discussed how I was very interested in aviation and how I had found a channel that outlines information about aircraft, how they fly and what causes aviation accidents. I explained that I thought it was a reliable source because the person who researches and presents the information was a captain for an airline. One of the students asked if I meant Mentour Pilot, because he watches it too and he wants to be a pilot. I just wanted to let you know that you are being watched by future pilots who aren’t even old enough to drive yet!
Could this mean academic system is like traditional education and covered in rhetoric? Imagine one says there a possibility to use quantum computing to limit data interference. There is probably no justification of hoping adults and youths have a base education level?
In 1965, as a fourteen-year-old boy, I flew from New York to Manchester, England on a BOAC Boeing 707. Only three passengers were in the first-class compartment-my mother, myself, and a businessman. About thirty minutes into the flight, the co-pilot emerged from the cockpit seated himself in the first-class compartment, reclined his seat, and lay his head back, apparently intending to sleep. Moments later, the flight attendant leaned over toward me and said, "The captain requests your presence in the cockpit." I happily followed her into the cockpit, and the captain introduced himself, the radio operator, and the navigator, and instructed me to be seated in the co-captains seat. For the next several hours, the captain explained many of the controls and instructed me in making minor throttle adjustments. I was even allowed to slightly bank the craft and return it to the proper heading. Of course, these adjustments were negligible and the pilot never took his hands from the controls. Perhaps a half-hour later, my mother was brought into the cockpit and was shown how to celestially navigate by the navigator. There was a sextant installed in the overhead. I wonder if this was a feature on all Boeing 707s or just the British versions of the craft. I remained in the cockpit until just before landing in Edinburgh, then returned to my seat and remained there until landing in Manchester.
Something similar happened with a co-pilot and allowing his kids into the cockpit and allowing them to fly the aircraft as well. That one resulted in a crash. I'm glad they don't let other people into the cockpit anymore to fly aircraft. But, that must have been an incredibly amazing experience for you.
The wonderful pre 911 days. I was admitted to the flight deck on a QUANTAS flight from Auckland to Brisbane in 2000. I had a 20 look around and talk with the captain. I was permitted to video and have a small video clip of the occassion.
Hey Petr, 40 professional pilot here. Have flown with the old sextant sticking out my celestial port many times and doppler radars for drift. Also have used, Omega, LORAN, Microwave Landing Systems and Pressure navigation in Antarctica. This was one of the best overviews I've seen! Just the right amount of detail for pro and basic enough for the layman. Very well written and edited sir!
I flew cross county on a 49 state tour with a loran receiver for the last time 1990s, while also holding a GPS receiver that needed every fixs typed in because the aviation one was to expensive, but we could afford a marine database one. Just putting the LAT/LONG in for a route was painful. But to report a fix while flying IFR, the two VORs radials crossing was happening like clockwork, that workload is what one did in cruise as the pilot not flying. By 2000 we had a glass cockpit in the rental 182 and 9inch moving map display with all the fixes and the long legs between fixes became time to drift off into a near nap monitoring the autopilot clicking off the next twelve waypoints. All the cockpit management skills went to better radio and monitoring ADS-B. If we do the same flight today, our legs could be 250 miles long and if VFR we would not bother talking to anyone outside of big city airspace.
@@giftofthewild66654:25-4:35 in the video shows aircraft sextants being used in flight. They were mostly used about 50 years ago when navigators were part of the flight crew.
Not a pilot but I love learning about aviation and Navigation. It adds to the "useless info" that I use or share with others when they say..."how do they do that?"
One day you'll be halfway through a transpacific flight and the captain will get on the intercom and say, "Attention passengers, do we have a Quantum Navigation System expert onboard?"
To me it's not about sharing it with others, it's to better understand my reality. I think that's where all conspiracy theories like flat earth come from, the complete lack of basic understanding of how stuff works. If you lack that knowledge AND you lose your trust in authority, you can be easily persuaded into any conspiracy.
@@mofayerActually, I think it’s about epistemology. By that, I mean it’s not a question of what you know. It’s a question of, “do you understand what knowledge is and how it’s acquired?” When you don’t, you think your own belief is knowledge and others’ knowledge is belief. A person with little knowledge could still have good epistemology. Flat earthers don’t believe that garbage because they lack knowledge. Rather, they don’t even know what knowledge is, and why someone else’s “knowledge” might be better than theirs. The distrust in authority you refer to stems from a misunderstanding of what knowledge is and an inability to distinguish it from mere belief. Why trust someone who presents belief as fact when their beliefs are no more justified than your own and they may have ulterior motives? That’s how a person with bad epistemology thinks. It’s not the unknowing that’s dangerous, it’s the certainty. I also think flat earthers are narcissistic sociopaths who need to invent reasons to feel superior, but that’s another discussion.
@@DemPilafianYes! I am certified in this and happy to help out on the flight deck. Let me grab my test kit from the overhead bin and tell the pilots I’ll be right up!
As a very retired airline pilot and sim instructor I found this video fascinating. Actually your description of current nav systems was one of the best I've heard in over 40 years in the industry. Keep up the good work.
I work in Oceanographic survey and construction. We use RLG, FOG and INS underwater. Mostly FOGs are used and preferred, out of the manufacturers we use, FOGs tend to be a more reliable name in our field however they are more sensitive to shock forces making them lose the accurate specifications though but their high accuracy is not always needed for our work. I have heard RLGs are much more resilient as the whole mirror and laser assembly is a single glass prizm so they not going to move position away or closer to each other and they are used to aim artillery guns as they can with stand the shocks well. As for INS we use it, but it will drift in minutes without additional sensors aiding it. Problem underwater is GPS doesn’t reach so by using GPS to get vessel position we then use an acoustic system to get position of underwater ROVs, structures etc in relation to Vessel and fron this we can know it underwater position. But it is not accurate like GPS but it is accurate enough. There are different acoustic systems that can be used. You can set up almost like your own temporary satellite array in a local area underwate but the method im most used to is you have vessel ping and remote beacons on underwater objects will reply back. The hydrophones (ears ) on the vessel are numerous and in an array. Depending on the timing between each hearing the reply it can calculate a direction and you can get a range based on the time from the vessel ping to the reply. This is usually done every 2-3 seconds. Remote becons do not always have a power source subsea and so it depends on how long you need the battery to last; more pings, less time you will have battery last. However sound in water travels slow enough that delay becomes an issue especially in deep water (1000m+) like found in Gulf of Mexico, west Africa for exanple. Sound will travel about 1500m/s, but 2000m depth means possibly getting close to 3 seconds between transmit- travel down and up time- process signal time. In the real world environment it is not unusual to lose replies or chirps not be heard by beacons underwater due to other noise, and masking (not being in line of sight) so on our navigation we will see position but it will only update once every couple of seconds or so in normal use. However if 1 or 2 of these replies are missed you go considerable time and distance if ROV is traveling where position is not known. This means rocks could appear meters away from their real location in a survey. There are ways to correct for this but correcting is not as good or accurate as getting accurate data during a survey. This reason is why we use INS on Rov when surveying, so as to assist and it has become standard required equipment a lot of the time. It will fill in the gaps between the replies and especially if we miss replies. So instead of seeing our ROV move as a series of dots updating every few seconds- it will be a smooth line traveling as it is in real life. They quantim navigation. I could see that making its way to my industry too as iif i understand correctly, i can see it could possibly remove some of the other equipment if it replaced INS units. It would also potentially save time and work when getting everything set up and calibrated i guess.
Back in the 1970s I flew on a Boeing 707 that was equipped with inertial navigation for trans polar flights. The system used gyroscopes and ring lasers to track the changes in position from a fixed starting point. It did drift over time but was still good enough to be within a few miles at the end of several thousand miles of flight. The difference between then and now is that the equipment fits in a shoe box today rather than completely filling an equipment bay and the space between the two pilot seats in the 707. That was also the time that the first GPS systems started to appear. You frequently had to wait six or more hours between fixes from the limited number of satellites available at the time.
Worst case: When there were only 4 active satellites (called SVs - space vehicles) they would only provide a "useful" solution for about 20 - 30 minutes, twice a day. The test period would move forward in time about 6 minutes every day as the orbital period wasn't exactly 12 hours. As an active test engineer back in the early GPS days we would truck out to the Yuma, AZ. test site at 3 in the afternoon grab data and return at around 3 AM and do it again. Today, with a minimum of 24 SVs (usually more than 30 now) there are usually six or more SVs in view which provide a robust solution 24/7 anywhere in the world.
Kelsey (74Gear) actually once made an entire video about it where he invited them to go on a flight with him to disprove the flat earth (if they finance it ofc)
@@_firecat_ and guess what happened? that's right, crickets.and i predict that the same is gonna happen with the final experiment. if that really happens, there won't be any flerfs on that trip.
Meh. Youll never convince them with facts or science because too many authority figures have hidden lies and schemes behind "facts" and "science". If you want to dissuade flat earth/moon hoax nonsense you first have to make "science" trustworthy again. And that means going hard on the people who abuse it to hide their agendas.
It fascinates me that even as our technological implementations become 'space age/futuristic' the basics remain the same. And the pilots who understand the basics will always be just a little better prepared to deal with "stuff that happens.' Thanks for another interesting video.
I need to make a small correction. GPS is the United States' navigation system, but there are many more, such as Galileo (European), GLONASS (Russian), BeiDou (Chinese), QZSS (Japanese), and NavIC (Indian). Our mobile phones typically use all of these systems, and I believe aviation does as well. The general term for all of these navigation systems is GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System).
Just as an interesting aside, my phone uses both GPS and GLONASS. It sees the WAAS satellites but doesn't use them in its navigational solutions, alas. Right at this moment, it's using 10 GPS and 5 GLONASS satellites. It's also getting good signals from two WAAS satellites but it's not using them.
@@norbert.kiszka when i run i sometimes also fly IFR however sometimes it is more convenient to use GPS (Go Path Less) in order to fly over areas that do not have roads however it seems my brain hired ryanair pilots so the landing was quite bad causing severe damage to the underbelly of the aircraft (edit takeoff was great tho)
Was taught when I was doing my PPL, if you really lost, fly low and read the road signs. There are other old ways like NDB's and radio station freq's if you know the tower positions, but the old road sign was old faithful
There is also the Hemispherical resonator gyroscope, used on satelites and Nuclear Subs. According to Wiki : It is highly accurate and is not sensitive to external environmental perturbations. The resonating shell weighs only a few grams and it is perfectly balanced, which makes it insensitive to vibrations, accelerations, and shocks.
@@MentourNow HRG might be more than enough accuracy for commercial air travel, especially if Quantum Gyroscopes are cost-prohibitive. Regardless of which route (or routes) the industry moves towards, the advances in the tech overall are pretty incredible. Great video as always, and the graphics to explain the gyroscopes and older navigation methods were top notch!
Interesting... hmm that's also how the microchip ones work, through tiny, flat, resonating masses, where the flexing and deviation of velocity of differently oriented masses affects resonance, which is measured. Thanks for that device info!
@@rogerphelps9939 Less drift than the best laser Gyro, 1° per week according to Safran, this is why Nuclear subs use them, they can't recalibrate often due to there missions. th-cam.com/video/fdMTKKP0d7g/w-d-xo.html
My first job out of university was as a navigator/bombardier in B52’s. Radar, celestial, and dead reckoning. Talk about becoming technologically unemployed.
These went away, but they are going back to teaching some of these same skills to limited military personnel, as a fallback, anticipating heavy EW environments.
Dead Reckoning is still a skill everyone needs for flight planning and time off even if the entire squadron hits the waypoint in the sky to the inch. Even with real time wind indicator you still want to work out what that does to next 6 legs for time on target. If you smell the pilots aftershave in the plane ahead the GPS is still working, if a turn is made to avoid running into each other, perhaps offset from the waypoint a NM.
My grandfather was a navigator turned electronics warfare officer in the airforce. He said the laser ring gyroscope was the biggest advancement in avionics ever. Before that, with mechanical gyros, the lubricating oil the military used was a highly guarded secret both in terms of composition and location - there were heavily fortified stockpiles around the nation and only a few people knew all the locations of the gyroscope oil.
Considering how much oil and grease are used in gyroscopes is similar to watches, that would be 3 55 gallon barrels in Vegas, Dayton and Rapid City SD that remain their to this day.
Excellent explanations! In the early 2000’s I was on a SWA flight from Sacramento to San Diego. It was the first fight of the day for that aircraft that had the new upturned wing tips. A strong storm was passing through, with winds 35 kts and gusts up to 45 kts. As we boarded, the plane was noticeably bouncing around. After boarding was complete, we made no move to pushback for over 30 mins when the pilot made a PA saying the aircraft was fine, but the bouncing around would not allow the three gyroscopes to synchronize and we could not take off until they all give the same result. He said the new wingtips made the plane move about more in the unusual lateral wind than the old straight wingtips. After a few more minutes, he even moved the aircraft behind a hanger in an attempt to shelter the plane from the wind. No joy. We had to stay in the ground another hour until the storm front passed and the plane stopped bouncing around enough so the gyros synced. Technology is nice…when it works! works. 21:12
@@petep.2092 No A plane flying from Sacramento to San Diego does not need an Inertial Reference System for navigation. Waypoint to waypoint (VORs) would work just fine. Or fly lower and look out the window.
The problem with any of the current quantum technologies is, as Petter mentioned, that they need to operate at as close to absolute zero as possible. It is actually not the device that is so big, it is the cooling solution that takes up space of at least a fridge. And it usually uses a consumable (like liquid Helium) to achieve these low temperatures. It is highly questionable how far this can be shrunk down, even a size reduction by half would be great progress.
Agreed. I am dubious about Hydrogen powered flight for the same reason. It’s one thing on a rocket where you have ground equipment for the whole time and then just 1 minute of use without, but for an aircraft flying for 15 hours, how is it going to keep fuel at -200°?
@@aenguswright7336 Heavent heard about Hydrogen cars? Its just very high pressure tanks. Its one of the challanges because a safe tank is also quite heavy. We are talking MegaPascals. Accordingly these cars carry only about 5kg of hydrogen. Edit: But planes may use combustion engines and higher cunsumption compared to cars with H-Fuelcells. For use of liquid hydrogen an option might be evaporative cooling as the gas is used. I'd guess they'll use similar storage tech to whats used in cars.
You probably expected this response but is this not the exact sort of thing that was once said about home computers? They took up whole rooms, now they fit in whatever shape we want.
The TV limited series Master's of the Air (2024) frequently showed excellent use of Dead Reckoning Navigation, used by the American Bomber Command in WWII. It was shown in detail on almost every flight, with the Navigator making the calculations using the information he had, as well as how much trouble the rest of the crew could get in to if their Navigator was killed mid-flight.
My father was a Coastal Command navigator in WW2 flying B-24 Liberators over the Atlantic Ocean looking for U-boats. They used to fly search patterns for 10-12 hours a few hundred feet above the ocean, using dead reckoning navigation. He was really good at mental arithmetic, as a trainee accountant, but the stress of being responsible for the lives of the whole crew was huge.
Cryogenic cooling means it's unlikely to be taking over from GPS for anything smaller than an aircraft. I can't see anything running cryo-tanks from a battery for long.
Apart from the power requirement: cryogenic systems are hard to miniaturize. To maintain a 300 °C temperature difference requires volume for insulation.
I enjoy your show and the way you present information, however, I have a couple of comments regarding your assessment of IRS systems: • I’ve been hearing about “cold atom” navigation (you referred to it as quantum nav) for nearly 20 years. I’m glad it’s finally coming to fruition. • FOG is not an improvement to RLG. Both systems are spec’d to 0.8nm/hr drift. NGC went full in with FOG while Honeywell stuck with RLG. Honeywell owns the commercial market. • FOG is not preferred by space applications. Space tends toward Hemispherical Resonator Gyroscope (HRG) “wine glass” systems. • RLG/FOG systems cannot “detect” the earth’s rotation rate. They assume the rotation rate given the inputted initial position. In a near mishap, an F-22 pilot (in Alaska) inputted 16 degrees vice 61 degrees latitude. The system went “upside down” and the aircraft temporarily departed controlled flight. • GPS is not “primary” in an IRS. Both inertial and GPS inputs go through a Kalman filter. Inertial is more accurate in the short term. A spurious GPS input will not send the IRS off-kilter. • Stellar nav is extremely accurate. Several military aircraft use (e.g. LN-120) for different applications. The obvious limitation is clouds… I’ve been out of the industry for a “few” years so my info might be a little dated. Keep up the great channel!
As a "boomer" who worked for a while at Decca when I was young, it was interesting to see a quick glimpse of one of those old nav. systems we were making that were rather "secret" at the time.
My father was a WWII era naval fighter pilot. His writing about his experience included the following: Navigation was one of the essential flying skills you had to master in the days before GPS. A typical carrier mission required flying over a featureless ocean searching for enemy aircraft, while at the same time charting compass heading, time, and wind drift on a small pullout navigation table in the cockpit. Most importantly, you had to keep track of a floating runway that was sailing away from your starting location at 15-20 knots the whole time you were aloft. Wind drift had to be estimated by looking at ocean whitecaps and waves. So it was with some relief that you came back into visual contact with the carrier when returning from a mission, knowing that you had done your navigation calculation correctly. That relief was followed, however, by a white-knuckle landing on a runway heaving in the ocean swells.
Even just seeing the footage of the seemingly endless expanse of the ocean from a WW2 cockpit makes me feel anxious. And that’s without even having to evade fighters or AA flak. The aviators that did that over and over again blow me away with their courage, and most of them were barely out of childhood.
It's also worth pointing out that some military planes used a form of automatic celestial navigation called astro-inertial navigation. If I remember correctly the SR-71 used such a system and it's rumored that the B-2 uses such a system as well.
Doubtful. If you have tto fly low to avoid being detected by radar tthe chances are that tthe stars will be obscured by clouds. Here in he UK tthat would be a near certainty!
@@rogerphelps9939 Astrotracker system was installed on F-111 aircraft for sure. A friend in the Air Force who maintained the systems once showed me the tracker installed under the canopy and behind the pilot''s seat. This was around 1975.
@@rogerphelps9939 B2 can fly higher than many planes without being tracked and like the F117 they tend to flight at night, a celestial navigation system could be a good backup for it
@@rogerphelps9939actually the SR-71’s astro-inertial unit would start picking up stars as soon as it was pulled out of the hangar, day or night, rain or shine.
@@rogerphelps9939 modern stealth doesn’t work like that. You don’t need to fly low for stealth to be effective. That was a tactic used by non stealth planes to evade radar. Stealth planes should remain far away from any sensors that can pick them up so flying low would be unadvisable. Also Astro-inertial navigation doesn’t require constant visibility of the sky. As the name implies it uses a mix of inertial navigation and celestial navigation to work. As long as there’s sky visibility once in a while navigation accuracy should remain high.
Thanks Petter, great story. I started my career on 747 classics with Carousel IV inertial systems, watched then as we moved on to the dramatic improvement with Laser ring gyros, and then finally GPS came into the mix. Then in the early 2000s we were the first airline in the Southern hemisphere to train on and use RNP approaches. I’m now retired since 2020 (Unfortunately Covid ensured that I had to go and put my feet up- will always miss the flying, though not waking to an alarm clock.) This looks really encouraging- hopefully it lives up to expectations in every respect.
I did a research project on this tech (ring trap Bose-Einstein Condensates) 10 years ago, cool to see that it's being implemented now. An issue is decoherence, or the atom bunches becoming less quantum and useful due to eg warning up. At the time, that was projected to be on the order of months in real deployments
So could some longevity be traded for cryo temperature while achieving adequate accuracy for the duration of a trans-Pacific flight plus some to bring down the size and make it more practical and feasible?
It might be a great solution. Its also worth mentioning the possibilities for automated IFR and automated celestial navigation (which is already used by satellites): the techniques of those methods, except done via cameras and a computer matches the ground features or stars to their known layout. Ground-detecting radar can perform that by matching the contours of land, forest, and buildings to the features that are expected along the route. Automated IFR is likely used for cruise missiles and milary drones, as we expect GPS to be jammed or spoofed in their usage areas. And thougg good gyroscopes could be used, those gyroscopes are critical military technology and we dont want to risk an enemy getting them if a weapon fails to detonate. This isnt as much of a worry for a software-based system, as the software can run on RAM (non-saved memory) and be programmed by the aircraft before firing, so a saved copy is never on the weapon - and the software vanishes from RAM within minutes or seconds of the weapon losing electrical power.
Great post .. which I was about to make! Data fusion of multiple current sensors can provide good results over land ... but over water you willalso need automated celestial navigation, as noted above.
@@635574 Airliners generally cruise above all weather so that's no issue for star tracking, and with special filters they can be made to work day or night. Automated star-trackers have been around for a long time, the "astro-inertial navigation system" used in the SR-71 was derived from a system developed in the 1950s for early cruise missiles. Whenever it had a clear view of the sky (day or night) it would automatically identify, locate and track the best visible stars in its catalog and use this data to counteract any drift of the inertial navigation system.
Hej Petter! I got my PhD in quantum physics decades ago, and while I still have to check out the details of this system - this seems like a truly ingenious idea. It's like someone connected two dots that appear to have nothing to do with each other. I'll dig deeper, till dess tack för videon, och ha det fint! ;)
GPS spoofing can easily be detected, we just don't do it yet. An aircraft needs two GPS antennas, one pointing at the sky and the other one pointing to the ground. Under normal circumstances the ground antenna receives no signal (no spoofing). If all of a sudden there's a strong GPS signal coming from the ground, we know there's a spoofing in progress, the aircraft can then disregard those data and revert to inertial navigation until the spoofing has gone away.
Better still have the antenna pointed at space shielded from the ground and unless you are flying your jammer in the sky it wont cause a problem for planes. The problem is the use of omni directional antennas. You also can't spoof Galileo because its cryptographicaly signed and the jammers wont have access to the private keys.
@@bernds6587 Which works on completely different frequencies with a completely different format and is not required for aircraft positioning. They are primarily for making GPS accurate enough for surveying and dates from before selective availability was turned off. With the advent of Galileo and refreshed GLONASS it is not actually required.
I purchased a hobby sparkfun GPS to survey with. Out of the box it's accurate to 120mm. With a little extra money the error can be reduced to a couple of centimeters or less. The protocol that makes this possible is called RTK and relies on a second GPS unit to detect the drift in the satellite orbit. The correction can be handled with a cell phone, a radio link modem and it is even available from a satellite. How you do it depends on where you are and what you're willing to pay for the additional accuracy. At the moment, I am cheap and a 5 inch or less of error is acceptable for my needs. I just need to know how badly the fence installers messed up. On the other hand, another professional surveyor is off by 20 feet.
@@jonathanbuzzard1376 i'm sure all of the GNSS broadcasts both encrypted and unencrypted signals. the unencrypted for civilian use which should be easily spoofed further, jamming does not require knowing the encryption key
There is also another type of navigation being studied that is based on pulsars and quasars in outer space. It's essentially an unjammable combination of GPS (where the pulsars are the satellites) and celestial navigation. Celestial drift is very slow and easy to correct for.
I worked for Northrop for 34 years. The changes in the technology was amazing to work with. RLGs were very work intensive, because of the cleanliness requirements before the system is sealed. Other products with fiber optical unit changed the applications possible for improvement. It was all very interesting work. I have been in this type of work for 45 plus years.
I've been in the navigation industry since 1977. This is in the oilfield and river crossing industries. Ring laser gyros have entered our market about 15 years ago but are still not the primary method for steering the bore as it were. This is primarily due to a company holding a monopoly on the technology. Well that has now come to an end and we have our first ring laser steering tool. This video that you produced is the first thing that really helped me understand how they work. Even though I have found your videos to be my favorite, this one blows everything else out of the water for me as it relates directly to what I do and answered so many questions. I've gone from being a big fan to a super fan! Keep it up.
In the 1980’s, the airport that I worked at lost the ILS to our primary runway. The FAA tried to schedule the outage during good weather months but it ran over time and budget. With no RNAV approach published (it took about two years to publish a new approach procedure at the time) we were left with ASR approaches as the only option for flight crews when the ceiling or visibility dropped. We have come a long long way since then.
Phased array recievers for GPS are probably an easier to impliment solution. Much harder to spoof GPS signals when you can filter out certain directions, and GPS jamming tends to come from below. I also heard 'near absolute zero' which is an engineering headache that might keep quantum gyroscopes beyond the reach of practical aircraft navigation. (Fridge sized experimental systems non withstanding.)
@@dbattleaxe That wouldn't stop jamming. If you think so I don't think you understand jamming. I work for an alarm company and they use encrypted wifi or other signals with encryption between devices in the home. Jamming can still disrupt the signals. Basically if you have a radio signal on a frequency with information. You just overwhealm the signal with a much stronger one so none of the original information on the frequency can be picked up. Like if someone whispers to you from the other side of the street and someone else yells as loud as they can in your ear. You wont hear a thing from the whisper. Doesn't matter if you use a code in your whisper.
@@dbattleaxe Could potentially stop spoofing yes. But making that change would require all devices all over the world to get an update. It would slow down performance. It would increase requirements of satelites because encryption is a LOT more computationally intensive. So a lot of satelites would probably need to be replaced. And all of them updated as well. Not an easy task though.
When I learned to fly (just after the Wright brothers LoL!) it was radio beacons and look-out-of-the windshield. In my work as an ecologist GPS was the eighth wonder of the world when it first appeared, and this episode has been a real insight as to where we are and what is to come. In view of how rapidly technology is advancing, it won't surprise me of the quantum inertial systems are in use surprisingly soon. Thank you for your excellent channels.
The implications of this for tactical/strategic aviation are huge too. A lot of important targets are defended by GPS jamming to complicate targeting and weapons guidance.
Sounds amazing! The main issue here is temperature management. Keeping the Q-INS system at near absolute zero would likely be difficult, heavy, expensive, and need a robust independent power backup. Unless and until they can make it work at near-room temperature, this is a major hurdle. Even today's IRUs need constant cooling and they don't need to be anywhere near Zero Kelvin. I really like these informative videos, keep them coming!
Nice to hear about new technology as an alternative. Im not a aviator but Im a pilot boat driver in the gulf of Finland and we are getting spoofed several times weekly, being thrown about one to two miles around of the actual position. Thank you Petter
I lived a cuple of hundred meters from a 412m high Loran-C tower close to Hellissandur, Iceland. When it was built it was the largest structure in europe and still is the 4th largest. But the plan is taking it down soon.
@@Inkling777 That was probably because for a ground station based radionavigation system like Loran-C was to have a high precision and a long range you need to have a very uniform evenly reflective flat terrain. Basically it will only work good over the ocean. But that is exactly where GPS spoofing/jamming is the least likely to happen and where it will cause the least trouble if it even happens. Basically even with all the imperfections and limitations GPS just made Loran-C completely irrelevant and obsolete for all purposes.
I worked with Inertial Nav equipment in the early 70's. (Polaris and Poseidon fire control) I love this overview and it is exciting to see how far things have come. Good work!!!
As a UK licenced Avionics Engineer I retired 20 years ago and very impressed by the advancement of aircraft navigation systems over this time. I was also one of the first commercial pilots to use GPS in my private aircraft in the 1980's. Your taĺk was very well presented.
The Gyro in a model helicopter ist absolutly correct. After 100 loopings it knows exactly the position of the helicopter. This is needed for a rescue button. You can see a test in the video 'Vstabi NEO rescue Logo 600 SX'. This flight computer has more computer power than a B2 Spirit. It was developed in Hanau near Frankfurt/Main / Germany where I live.
The drift issue only really materializes after a longer period. For instance todays aviation grade IRS drift values in a flying aircraft is >0.6nm/hr or >0.01°/hr. The absolute positional deviation is of course smaller for a slower vehicle. Also drift doesn't necessarily occure perfectly linear and the deviation effective deviation can even reduce over time. How long does an RC-Helicopter fly and how fast is it and how far does it move away from the initial position?
A) there's no such thing as absolutely correct instruments. B) I'm a developer of one of the primary firmware systems used in RC aircraft - the accelerometers and gyros (IMUs) typically used, without GPS and compass, are accurate enough to navigate for maybe 100-200 meters before you start going well off track. This is due to the double integration problem. If there is accelerometer error of say 1%, so it reads 1.01G instead of 1.00G, that very small error in the accelerometer reading means the system falsely reads 0.01G of acceleration in some random direction. That tiny amount of acceleration over a 5 or 10 minute period translates to significant speed. So you soon have a medium amount of speed error, thinking you're traveling 65 MPH north when you're actually hovering still. Calculating position from that, the system thinks it's been going 40 MPH or 60 MPH or whatever for the last 5-10 minutes - that's a big error in position. 8-10 miles of positional error in 10 minutes. All from a 1% error in acceleration reading, because that error is compounded twice on every loop of the firmware.
This is MEMS micro electro-mechanical Systems where small vibrating beam gros and PEGA accelerometers are made part of Integrated circuits. The are also Magnetometers and tilt meters. Perfectly good for missile guidance as well as drones and model aircraft.
The first method is "pilotage". I flew a 707 (Flt. Engr.) that had a dome for celestial nav for crossing oceans, in the DC-12 we had 3 INS units. Finally in the 777 I flew the latest in "ring laser gyros". OF course I used all of the other methods you explained. Nice description of the RLGs.
@@mrxmry3264 Well, you are correct. But from what I've read, their star tracker was actually able to see the stars from the ground, before takeoff. I'd find a reference for you if I could but I'm sure I read that. [EDIT] The stars were sighted through a special quartz window (located behind the RSO cockpit) and there was a special star tracker that could see the stars even in daylight.’
@@b1lleman it could see stars during the day on the ground? how is that possible? the only way i can think of is if the wavelengths of the blue sky are filtered out, leaving only longer wavelengths not coming in from the atmosphere.
@@mrxmry3264 All valid questions, I don't know myself ;-) I have some books to read on the subject so I might be able to come back here if I remember to do so .....
Former Naval Flight Officer who did a tour instructing at the joint Air Force/Navy Navigation training squadron. To give you an idea of how accurate celestial navigation is, any cel fix within 15 NM of the actual position was passing, within 7NM was considered excellent. Our flights using cel had clearance 20NM either side of centerline, and we routinely had to ask for more so the students wouldn’t know exactly how lost they were.
Fantastic Episode - Really appreciate it. Kindly consider doing an in-depth series of episodes on the currently used navigation systems - That will be very very interesting. Thanks for the great work n videos you so precisely n passionately put together. 👌🏼
Please bear in mind that Ring Laser and Fibre Optic Gyro based Inertial Guidance systems are currently graded according to their accuracy/ drift rate. The better the accuracy / lower drift rate, the higher the grading/ category. Very high grade units have export restrictions and are prohibited for use in the US/Europe for anything other than military equipment. Commercial airliners are not allowed to use these "high grade" units, not only because of the cost, but because of the risk of theft by "bad" actors/countries. So I never expect to see these quantum gyros in aircraft, even if the cost comes down. If they did, Russia / China/ N. Korea / Iran would scavenge the parts for military uses.
I remember reading something where RLGs in general were heavily restricted to the point of being a classified tech until some openness program in collaboration with Russia on the ISS in the 1990's. I think they traded some rocket engine stuff within the joint venture for access to that? It's funny how things rolled back diplomatically again, so we probably wont see that kind of thing happening again soon.
I’m a long-retired pilot and as such found this video fascinating. You certainly do your research, and the presentation is first class! When I retired GPS was really only just coming on line as a mainstream airline system. It always has worried me that we went from fully a self-contained system (INS) to a satellite-based system, and I’m heartened to hear that self-containment for air navigation is making a return. Thank you so much for sharing! ❤
GPS is not the only game in town. The ESA runs the Galileo network independent of the American GPS on different frequencies with its own set of satellites. However because the Galileo signals are still quite week, they can be jammed about as easily at GPS.
I remember an episode of The Big Bang Theory in which Howard and Raj are working on quantum navigation. It's kind of impressive how much science/tech reality was embedded in that show.
I currently live in Finland and the amount of spoofing and jamming in this region coming from Russia is crazy. Finnair and others have given up flying to some airports in Finland and Estonia as the parameters have gone beyond safe levels. If I remember then these are smaller airports without state of the art landing systems so they require GPS to give valid info for passenger planes.
I get the feeling that it would be prudent to use all of them at the same time. - A camera on the aircraft scans the ground features (assuming over land flight) and matches those ground features with a mapping database specifically set up for this purpose. - Another camera on the aircraft scans the skies for signatures of stars, even in daylight because that's actually possible, and uses celestial navigation to determine your location. - Inertial systems (of varying accuracy, just redundant) are tracking your progress. - GPS does GPS things. - Radio beacons do radio beacon things. - Pilots do pilot things. - Pitot tubes measure airspeed. - All other sensors one can think of measures altitude (including lidar) and whatnot. Everyone TOGETHER paints a picture of where the aircraft is at the specific moment in time, its speed, elevation and PYR etc etc. And if one system deviates from the average of all other systems, that system is deemed untrustworthy, but not completely blocked, just not trustworthy and you get a "trustworthy" measurement, a "combined measurement" and a "possibly incorrect" measurement from the untrusted source. The pilot is the final deciding factor. We still can't beat humans when it comes to automated/smart systems. As evident by the pilots clearly knowing they are at 30,000 feet and still getting terrain warnings. And the horror cases where an aircraft will pull down because it thinks it's going to stall when clearly it isn't going to stall and so it plummets into the ground and the pilots can do nothing but ride along... Either way, we should not be working to trust any one system. No matter how accurate and incorruptible it is. Systems fail, people fail, the world ends around us and the systems and people are all we got. Redundancy is the point here. No one system should have a veto over the people it's serving. And at the same time, no one person should have a veto over all other people and systems. For example, when flying in the clouds. You as a person really have no option but to trust your instruments. As a person you could be flying upside down (in a loop for G force reasons) and still think you are in level flight going towards Gran Canaria. With redundancy, you can see that the ONLY one who is wrong here is YOU. Since all other systems agree that you are currently doing an inverse loop-de-loop and so you really should start trusting the systems COMBINED reports. The "terrain, PULL UP" warnings are pretty damn annoying too BTW. If i am flying in a tunnel, the LAST thing i want to do is PULL UP. The warning should instead inform me that i need to PAY ATTENTION. And then it should state a reason for the warning. But it shouldn't be telling me what to do. PAY ATTENTION, TERRAIN IMPACT IN 2 MINUTES. PAY ATTENTION, POSSIBILITY OF STALL DETECTED. PAY ATTENTION, YOU FORGOT TO CALL YOUR WIFE. PAY ATTENTION, BANK ANGLE. PAY ATTENTION, POSSIBLE GPS FAILURE. PAY ATTENTION, FUEL LEVEL. and so on.
Agree on all the points except the last one, airbus warnings/cautions are are designed very well imo, there are varying degrees of “pay attention” communicated by the aircraft. You cant call them all “pay attention” as some may need more attention than others and more importantly, some are more urgent than others. In your example, “bank angle” and “terrain impact in 2 mins” should not be grouped in the same category as the first onlynrequires you to lessen bank angle but the second is imminent death
When I was in the oilfield, we used mechanical gyros to do orientations and surveys. The tool had to be calibrated before each job and high sided onsite to set a reference orientation. It was sensitive enough to detect the rotation of the earth. Magnetic measurement tools do not work in steel casing, only open hole. Gyros are amazing devices
If it works, it will be made smaller very quickly. It's not about a plane or a submarine... if you can put the thing into a missile, you can have a completely unjammable cruise missile that follows terrain in 30m height and hits a preprogrammed target with an unprecedented accuracy. It would be the perfect "remove exactly this building and this building only"-weapon.
Not much help if you’re fighting an enemy that uses everyday itsms to cause catastrophic chaos and doesnt card about precision strikes. The weaponised human is pretty hard to stop
I noticed one interesting thing, after having watched this video and going to researchgate, namely: most of the research that shows up in the search results regarding this topic, is coming from Teheran... 🤔 I think I know how Iran wants to use this technology...
Missiles already use encrypted GPS and an IRS systems. Spoofing isn't possible and if the signal is jammed, the IRS takes over until GPS can be reestablished. Jamming is difficult because the antenna is pointed up limiting the effect that a ground system would have and as the jamming would take place near the target, there isn't much time to accumulate errors. It's already been battle tested and works well enough for the military. Non military aircraft can't use encryption and need something that will work over a longer range so what is good for the military isn't going to work in non military applications.
@@denawiltsie4412 Encrypted GPS signals can be half-аss spoofed, where the original signal just gets recorded and gets resend with a delay making it look like the aircraft is further away from a satellite. It's crude, but it's something. And just jamming by sending out garbage signals can also be done.
I work as an aircraft engineer in line maintenance. On a daily base we deal with „GPS“ failure messages since a few months. So, YES, I‘d love to see the IRS as a primary navigation again. I can remember my first aeronautical modules and my first type training on the A320, where the GPS was the backup system - the good old times!!
It would be amazing for subterranean navigation. Go into a cave system and your "GPS" could create a track and you could always find your way out and map at the same time.
INS on fighters in 1970's. We always said inertial system just works out where it isn't then can say where it is. Looks like we had quantum already in those days!
Interestingly, we use the same navigation techniques when sailing. Of course, everything is much slower on a boat, but we use a combination of dead reckoning, forward bearings, back bearings and transits to locate ourselves when sailing.
One of the reasons there was so much research in to inertial navigation with cellphones about a decade ago is because if it had been accurate enough it would have made indoors navigation possible, but due to the drift in current MEMS based sensors it's never been accurate enough to be useful. Purely inertial based navigation where you only need to know where you started from and would then know on an atomic level how you moved to pinpoint your exact location is pretty much the holy grail of navigation systems.
I think MEMS is at about 0.5m/sec drift (about 1 knot) drift per hour. Much better can be achieved apparently. 1 nautical mile drift per hours is about where inertial navigation was in the 1990s. It's enough for Surface to Air and Anti Tank Missile guidance or the takeover if there is a short GPS drop out.
Incredibly interesting information. Given how long it has taken just to get a 25 hour CVR, I wonder how long it will take for this type of technology to make its way through the bureaucratic behemoths?! Does this technology only solve lateral navigation? The final report of NSZ4311 brought up some interesting issues around the vertical component.
Hi Petter, I don't know if you've come across something called Kalman Filtering, but It is a statistical method of using probability to estimate errors in control systems and has been used for many years in aircraft navigation systems. Certainly the Panavia Tornado used Kalman Filtering in its navigation computers to process the data from various systems and sensors including the Inertial Navigation Unit to get the best estimate of position. This was before the days of GPS which doesn't have the issue of cumulative errors, but I would believe the technique is still employed in the Inertial Navigation Systems of modern aircraft as a backup against loss of GPS.
Any chance you could react to Die Hard 2? Terrorists spoofed an entire airport & crashed a plane by altering ground level. Always wondered how realistic it is.
One could only set the groundlevel downwards to make planes crash on ILS landings - but then there is the radio altimeter, which also needs to be jammed (maybe by a G5 transmitter ;-) )
@@Spechtlerimwald ISL uses multiple radio signal beams. It doesn't transmit data. An over simplified explanations is that it is like following a laser beam down to the landing. (See explanations on this or other channels.) To give a false low elevation the slope angle transmitter antenna would basically need to be buried under ground by that amount. It would be much easier to change the angle, direction or origin of the beams than the elevation of the origin of the beam. G5 broadband only interferences with radio altimeters when they use the same frequency. This was only ever an issue in the USA. Even in the USA not all G5 was on the same frequency that some radio altimeters used. Last the USA FAA has required some "fix" of this issue. I don't know what that fix was. But the "fix" / change was an FAA change not an FCC change.
@@erniecolussy1705 well, I meant the famous "terrain ahead, pull up" @>10000ft, which is due to a spoofed GPS signal and may also inhibit autoland/ILS even though the radio altimeter still gives correct data ...
Yeah, I have covered that in many if my previous videos. I just referenced GPS because its what most people recognize and what we use in the Boeing I fly.
I suppose that's the question, it's not always the case that if you have GPS you have all the other systems. It's entirely possible for a navigation system to not listen to the other GNSS systems. But it also makes me wonder if airlines should reduce their dependence on GPS alone. Perhaps they could adopt the secure Galileo signal? But it's also worth noting that many countries are exploring land based navigation signals again, so something like eLORAN might be making a comeback.
"A trademark is prone to genericization when a brand name acquires substantial market dominance or mind share, becoming so widely used for similar products or services that it is no longer associated with the trademark owner, e.g., linoleum, bubble wrap, thermos, taser." (Wikipedia). The same can be said about GPS, pedantics can cry all about it but can't change it. The layperson calls any satellite navigation "GPS" and that's it.
Quick OCD observation - the angular velocity at the equator is 15 degrees per hour, which is the same at any latitude. Tangential velocity is what changes.
There are ways to decide whether a GPS beam is reliable or spoofed. Each beam has identifying information and it can be determined if it is orbiting Earth at some 7 m/s or static on Earth. Equipment that analyzes these signals and, for example, only uses signals from space unless an airport has a well-known GPS beam should be possible to make in a matter of months.
@@tomyochum No, the signal from a GPS transmitter contains the precise coordinates of where the transmitter is. Comparing the coordinates of successive messages will tell you the velocity of the transmitter, and the velocity and approximate coordinates of each transmitter are known. You cannot spoof all of those details in a credible way, all at the same time.
@@andresvillarreal9271 No, the precise coordinates are not sent. The message basically says "I'm satellite X and the time is Y". You use the satellite ephemeris data to compute the location of satellite X at time Y. Then you can compute a pseudo-range to the satellite.
@@tomyochum This is a distinction without a difference. The satellite transmits the ephemeris data from which you calculate the position, so indirectly the satellite transmits the position. It is like sending me the map of a highway and telling me how many meters you have traversed on the highway. I have to do some calculations, but the map and the distance traveled tell me exactly where you are.
We use GNSS for vertical grade control . Around 10 years ago we noticed some vertical elevation drift. Our location is close to a USMC test site . When they testing F35 electronic warfare systems our GNSS system experienced a huge lack of integrity. So out come our old school laser grade control units . Your presentation is on of best ever.
As others have mentioned, calling all global navigation systems "GPS" is extremely inaccurate. GPS itself is actually the most outdated and inaccurate system. Galileo goes to ~20cm precision on the publicly available version. Aircraft can use that even without differential techniques, which of course eliminates the need for ground stations
To prevent spoofing, GPS receivers can also use beam forming to make it so that GPS signals can only be received from directions where satellites were; GPS can also be augmented with sidechannel signatures for GPS messages.
Traveling at approximately a 600mph at altitude with say a nice tail wind the aircraft is covering 880' per second. I'm amazed piolets can be thinking ahead of position in real time. Blink and your hundreds of feet away from point you closed your eyes. Taking into account how fast out brains perceive reality, piolets are amazing. Thank You one and all.
9:13 His depiction of the two beams turning on and off is not the way the RLG works. The timing in the RLG is is achieved by detecting phase differences between the two beams thus causing an interference pattern. Think of it this way. We send out two waves in opposite directions around a loop or ring, if they arrive at the detector at the same time the waves overlap perfectly (in phase) so that crests (high points) line up with crests and troughs (low points) line up with troughs, so the waves generate an interference pattern. If one beam is delayed due to rotation, i.e., it travels a longer distance, then the waves do not line up perfectly and the interference pattern changes. Analysis of this change gives the rate of rotation. There is not any real timing as you might think of using a stopwatch, rate of rotation is accomplished by the analysis of the interference patterns. This is the result of a phenomenon called the "Sagnac Effect." Here is an example that is similar. I used to have my students measure the speed of light right in the hallway of the science building. It was always exciting to be able to measure of of the fundamentals and most important constants in the universe using a few hundred dollars of equipment set up in a hallway. here is how it was done, which is not that dissimilar to the way an RLG works. We used a LASER which could be modulated, i.e., we could impress a wave of known frequency on it so the intensity (brightness) varied with a known timing. The wave was split by a beam splitter with one beam going directly into a simple photocell detector. The second beam was sent up the hallway a known distance and reflected back to a second detector. Thetwo signals were fed into an oscilloscope which displayed them as two waves. The wave that traveled down the hallway was delayed slightly and so it was shifted slightly in the display. Knowing the scan rate of the oscilloscope allowed the students to determine the travel time difference. Speed is distance divided by time, so they could now determine the speed of light. It worked quite well with errors averaging about ten percent (10%) which is very good for such a simple setup. If we had more sophisticated (meaning prohibitively more expensive) equipment we could have analyzed an interference pattern as the RLG does and gotten much more precise and accurate results. By the way, precision and accuracy are NOT the same. Accuracy is a measure of how close your measurements are to the correct value. Precision is how fine they are. By that I mean that being able to measure to the nearest ounce is more precise than measuring to the nearest pound. A postal scale used to measure the weight of letters in ounces and fractions of an ounce is more precise than a bathroom scale used to measure the weight of people in pounds
Wouldn't these things be REALLY expensive? Like, having a device with a space inside of it that is constantly kept at almost absolute zero... that must need a lot of power and precision engineering, which isn't cheap
@@AnomymAnonym Most quantum devices (computers, these gyro’s etc) currently only work when cooled to as close to 0 Kelvin as possible, a vacuum is not enough. Surprisingly, the coldest known place in the entire universe, by far, is on Earth in these devices.
@@AnomymAnonym16:44 Also, from an article about the test: On the flights were Infleqtion’s ‘Tiqker’ optical atomic clock and “a tightly confined ultra-cold-atom-based quantum system”, according DSIT, which said: “Portable production of ultra-cold atoms is key piece of the puzzle. Ultra-cold atoms are ideal for building quantum accelerometers and gyroscopes.”
Actually, a GPS satellite doesn’t report its location. It only reports the time from its atomic clock. By comparing the differing time signals from four satellites which are known to all have agreeing clocks, you can triangulate (quadranglulate? rectangulate?) your position in 4D spacetime. 😊
The receiver *has* to know where each satellite is at the time the time signal is received. Each satellite transmits data about its position and orbital parameters (it's ephemeris) continually over a number of transmitted "frames", and it takes about 30 seconds to transmit the complete data set. Finding your position from at least 4 (it needs at least 4 to be able to correct your receiver's clock) satellites is know as Trilateration.
I’m an aero systems engineer with a military background. Of course this us super useful for navigation particularly for the military, initially, then in commercial navigation to be sure. Excellent video.
The main concern I see in the future with GNSS jamming or spoofing, is that a bad actor could spoof the location of the aircraft in a way that gradually deviates from the real location. If the deviation occurred over the course of an hour, who would notice it? The inertial navigation system would also re-calibrate itself off the new location(s). That location deviation could be the difference between flying in hostile airspace or not.
This is the present, not the future. However, it has to be honed for a particular target and you have to follow that target. Meaning, if there aren't fighters with jammers on your tail, this isn't something that can happen to a civilian aircraft. And if there are, they can simply tell you where you have to fly and land
Switch to Galileo which is cryptographicaly signed so unless you have access to the private key which a bad actor wont you cannot spoof the signal as the signature check would fail and you know the signal is spoofed.
@@jonathanbuzzard1376 it doesn't help. Spoofing retransmits real signals which is why military GPS with encrypted signal is also disabled by ECM just fine
@@NJ-wb1cz you cannot spoof an encrypted signal because it will fail the cryptographic check so you know you are spoofed. You can still jam the signal, but just stop using an omnidirectional antenna and you solve that problem too unless the jammer is moved above you which in a plane at 30,000ft is hard. The proble is commercial aviation use GPS which is not encrypted they need to switch to Galileo which is and they use omnidirectiknal antennas, they need to switch to directional antennas that are pointing into space. Do that and the jamming spoofing problem goes away.
@@jonathanbuzzard1376 take the signal and retranslate it. All your checks succeed. This is literally already being done and why lots of high tech weapons like excaliburs that use encrypted gps completely failed in Ukraine
One feature of the INS (Inertial Nav System) on the L-1011 that most customers selected was 'self correction'. After a long flight when you parked at the gate, you would manually enter Lat Long. You used the Lat Long from a sign at the gate. The computer would compare its last known position with the one entered manually. The difference would be used by the computer to compensate for drift error. After about 4 flights it became amazing accurate. Except for one bug. The Lat Long manually entered from the sign's info at the gate were wrong. Some one finally figured that out and the correct Lat Long was placed on the signs.
"VFR" has nothing to do with navigation. It is a set of rules for flying while not under positive control and in non-instrument conditions. What you are talking about is called "pilotage".
@@martientazelaar6733 After 36 years as an airline pilot and 24,000 hrs. in jet transports, I don't think I need to head back to school. Do you understand the difference between FAA rules for meteorological conditions and a means of navigation? From the FAA: "VISUAL FLIGHT RULES- Rules that govern the procedures for conducting flight under visual conditions. The term “VFR” is also used in the United States to indicate weather conditions that are equal to or greater than minimum VFR requirements. In addition, it is used by pilots and controllers to indicate type of flight plan."
1st method mentioned, locating ground features on a map, is called pilotage. VFR means you are maintaining visibility and cloud separation requirements, regardless of navigation method.
Thank you. This was nicely presented (Naturally there are many aspects of inertial navigation not mentioned, but then again, this is for public consumption.) Retired Boeing Flight Analyst. Ken
Great video! I worked on flight simulators in the Air Force in the early eighties, before GPS. The navigation system used was inertial, but you had to manually enter your starting position. During a mission, the radar could be used to find a particular reference point. Then the WSO would put the crosshairs on the feature in order to correct for any drift or inaccuracy that accumulated during the mission. The simulation available today can be on a laptop. Back then we needed a room the size of a basketball court to fit all the electronics and computers to do the job.
So this is where my avgeek and space geek stuff comes together… The first inertial navigation system using fixed axis gyros and early computers was developed by Charles Draper at MIT and in 1953 was used to fly a B-29 from Boston to LA. It was called SPIRE. The plane appeared to be flying off course towards the end of the flight, but it was simply correcting for sidewinds. Cleared the clouds and they had the destination airport in sight. This system is why MIT got the first contract from NASA for the Apollo program long before any other contracts were signed, and with IBM was refined down to what was used in Apollo and later spaceflight. The starting point was programmed into the computers on the Saturn rocket instrument unit (the stage separator above the second stage). The instrument unit had multiple prisms around it with lasers on the ground pointed at them and these triangulated precisely the rocket’s angles, and then the computer knew how to roll and pitch the rocket using the gimballed F-1 and J-2 engines to orbit using the guidance gyros until the instrument unit was jettisoned. The instrument unit also had rate gyros which sent one electrical pulse for every 0.5g so the rocket knew its velocity so it could control the fuel flow to the engines. The loop from the instrument unit to the engines and back was 2 seconds due to the limitations of the computers then which is why Apollo astronauts described it feeling like being on a freight train. Another smaller inertial navigation system was inside the command module where it was programmed using celestial navigation and 3 points - 2 known stars and KSC in Florida. On Apollo 8, Jim Lovell at one point accidentally told the computer it was back on the pad before correcting it. The comment above about the lasers and prisms - when “guidance is internal” is heard before launch - that’s when the lasers were no longer used and it switched to the inertial guidance system. To think they did this in the 1950s and 60s.
Petter, you had me absolutely NERDING out over this video. I'm working on my PhD in physics playing with lasers and atoms and actually one recent graduate from my research group published a paper on enhancement of gyroscopic signals by multiple factors of 10 based on the quantum gyroscope you described! I can link the paper if there is enough interest, but I wanted to say you gave a wonderful introduction to quantum gyroscopes via lasers! It was so cool to see my love for quantum and aviation combined! Also worth mentioning, quantum cryptography has been an emerging field, which allows for maximum data security against hackers, due to the fact that quantum states collapse after being observed (vaguely). the technology is far from being practical, but there is a ton of cool research happening in that field which could really enhance the security of aviation navigation systems!
Very nice discussion of navigation. BTW, if any readers are in (or visiting) Washington, the Air and space museum has a whole room devoted to navigation and is well-worth a visit. Advanced inertial navigation systems have been in use by the military for a while, and will make their way into civil aviation over time. In cruise missiles (which are just aircraft by another name) for example, the user wants the missile to have extremely precise position accuracy all the way to the 'landing." But it is very easy to jam GPS, so the last few miles to the destination cannot rely on GPS and must use some form of inertial navigation. One of the key components is the solid state gyro, similar to what you have in your cellphone. Isn't it amazing how your phone will rotate the image as you rotate your phone from portrait to landscape? I'm sure that within my lifetime we will all carry precision navigation devices that do not rely (exclusively) on GPS.
We use the IRS/INS systems on board commercial aircraft to orient the satellite communications systems that provide internet connectivity during flight. Having a precise latitude and longitude as well as info on pitch, yaw, roll, and the rate of change for those, allow the antennas to be pointed very accurately toward the desired satellite. Once the satellite is acquired the antennas will typically do closed loop tracking to maintain accurate pointing regardless of any movement of the airframe due to turbulence or flight maneuvers. In the event that the IRS from the aircraft isn't available, the satcom system does have a back-up means of acquiring a pointing solution, but it takes longer to initially find the satellite. Given that there are typically three inertial reference units on commercial aircraft that vote between themselves, an outright failure of the IRS is really rare.
Having been retired as a Flight Dispatcher for 23 years, I am amazed at the advances in air (space) navigation. When I started in 1959, LF airways were still around and VORs were just taking over. In the 1990s when we pioneered "over the pole" airways from the US and Europe to Asia we were still using INS. It would experience a few minutes of being "lost" when directly over the North Pole. We encountered that when operating the proving runs prior to certification.
This could also be a navigation system for spacecraft or surface rovers for example around the moon or Mars. Initialize it from time to time on a known location, maybe due to accurately located surface features and you have your position any time available. Thinking a bit out if the box of Earth ;-)
From Oct 1959 to Aug 1965 I was assigned to the Test and Development of the B-58 Hustler, a Supersonic Delta Wing Bomber in the USAF, as an aircraft Mechanic. That aircraft have an Astronaut Tracker as well as two IRS. In the future all commercial and military aircraft.
Around 30 years ago, I was working for a major aerospace contractor on DoD and NASA projects. I seem to remember that they were working on a system that used the different signature radiation patterns of various stars to determine your position. I don't know if they ever perfected it though.
It may be worth mentioning that 'dead reckoning' is actually a sort of abbreviation for 'deduced reckoning'. If you know your starting point and you know the speed, direction and time of travel you can deduce where you are.
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@@MentourNow in nutshell what is the procedure to deal with gps spoofing
I still wonder why we have to rely on ground-based ILS. With the high horizontal precision that GPS provides, isn't there adequate computing power to calculate 1) a virtual localizer and glideslope extending from any runway, 2) how many "dots" off the airplane is and 3) display that on a conventional crossed-needle display? If Microsoft Flight Simulator can do it for desktop computer simulations and a CAE simulator can do it for certifiable pilot training, why not for real airplanes? Isn't something like it already done for RNAV constant-descent final approaches? It could even do autopilot-coupled gently curved final approaches for awkward terrain, obstacles and noise abatement but maybe not autoland, just yet. Think how many GA and regional airports could get a precision approach to minimums to improve safety without the huge and currently prohibitive infrastructure and recurrent maintenance costs of ILS and no additional pilot training for new technology, just the development and cert cost of a Synth-ILS box with integrity monitoring and redundancy. Assuming of course, there is no GPS spoofing/jamming. Would eliminate risk of capturing false glideslopes and distortion due to ground vehicles, taxiing airplanes and snow buildup. Would help if the military made precise GPS available, the current dither doesn't provide much security, drop it.
We need PILOTS with significant time flying to run this planet rather than salesmen/ women
oh
As an old retired 767 pilot I am amazed at the advances in navigation. However the old ones weren't too bad. Back in the days before GPS we relied on IRS for long range nav. It updated automatically using ground aids before going over water. It never ceased to amaze me when after a few hours over water, arriving over a long/lat reporting point, we could see another aircraft directly overhead or below at the exact same spot. Cheers,, Peter
Not wholly sure relying on the Internal Revenue Service for your airline navigation fills me with that much confidence somehow.
@@c2757terrible joke
Have a thumbs up
My airline still has a fleet Classics with DME/DME/IRU only. Works fine for RNAV!
And here I've always felt like we should keep LORAN maintained as an extra backup....
It may be old tech, but it’s good tech
Hey Petter, the most amazing thing happened today. I am a primary school teacher (ages 5-12) in a public (gov owned) school Sydney, Australia. I current teach science to all grades from Kindergarten to Year 6. Today I taught a Year 4 (10yo). We were discussing reliable sources to use online, including TH-cam channels. I discussed how I was very interested in aviation and how I had found a channel that outlines information about aircraft, how they fly and what causes aviation accidents. I explained that I thought it was a reliable source because the person who researches and presents the information was a captain for an airline. One of the students asked if I meant Mentour Pilot, because he watches it too and he wants to be a pilot.
I just wanted to let you know that you are being watched by future pilots who aren’t even old enough to drive yet!
@@LungsMcGee I’ll make sure I tell him… but he probably already knows!
Could this mean academic system is like traditional education and covered in rhetoric? Imagine one says there a possibility to use quantum computing to limit data interference. There is probably no justification of hoping adults and youths have a base education level?
I think that is a beautiful story... and the kid? Well, I would be proud and feel safe to fly in a plane that he might command when he is of age!
Thats awesome! Petter has excellent teaching skills and presents aviation in a fantastic way. ❤
In 1965, as a fourteen-year-old boy, I flew from New York to Manchester, England on a BOAC Boeing 707. Only three passengers were in the first-class compartment-my mother, myself, and a businessman. About thirty minutes into the flight, the co-pilot emerged from the cockpit seated himself in the first-class compartment, reclined his seat, and lay his head back, apparently intending to sleep.
Moments later, the flight attendant leaned over toward me and said, "The captain requests your presence in the cockpit." I happily followed her into the cockpit, and the captain introduced himself, the radio operator, and the navigator, and instructed me to be seated in the co-captains seat. For the next several hours, the captain explained many of the controls and instructed me in making minor throttle adjustments. I was even allowed to slightly bank the craft and return it to the proper heading. Of course, these adjustments were negligible and the pilot never took his hands from the controls.
Perhaps a half-hour later, my mother was brought into the cockpit and was shown how to celestially navigate by the navigator. There was a sextant installed in the overhead. I wonder if this was a feature on all Boeing 707s or just the British versions of the craft.
I remained in the cockpit until just before landing in Edinburgh, then returned to my seat and remained there until landing in Manchester.
Something similar happened with a co-pilot and allowing his kids into the cockpit and allowing them to fly the aircraft as well. That one resulted in a crash. I'm glad they don't let other people into the cockpit anymore to fly aircraft. But, that must have been an incredibly amazing experience for you.
I remember being in the cockpit of a 767 from Au to NZ in the 90s as a teenager. All pre 911 stuff.
The wonderful pre 911 days. I was admitted to the flight deck on a QUANTAS flight from Auckland to Brisbane in 2000. I had a 20 look around and talk with the captain. I was permitted to video and have a small video clip of the occassion.
No such thing as a co-captain. Cool story though!
In 1999 I went to the cockpit of a Fokker and generally the cabin door was always open.
Hey Petr, 40 professional pilot here. Have flown with the old sextant sticking out my celestial port many times and doppler radars for drift. Also have used, Omega, LORAN, Microwave Landing Systems and Pressure navigation in Antarctica. This was one of the best overviews I've seen! Just the right amount of detail for pro and basic enough for the layman. Very well written and edited sir!
Oh wow I had no idea pilots used sextants 😮 I thought that was just for ships
I flew cross county on a 49 state tour with a loran receiver for the last time 1990s, while also holding a GPS receiver that needed every fixs typed in because the aviation one was to expensive, but we could afford a marine database one. Just putting the LAT/LONG in for a route was painful.
But to report a fix while flying IFR, the two VORs radials crossing was happening like clockwork, that workload is what one did in cruise as the pilot not flying. By 2000 we had a glass cockpit in the rental 182 and 9inch moving map display with all the fixes and the long legs between fixes became time to drift off into a near nap monitoring the autopilot clicking off the next twelve waypoints. All the cockpit management skills went to better radio and monitoring ADS-B. If we do the same flight today, our legs could be 250 miles long and if VFR we would not bother talking to anyone outside of big city airspace.
@@giftofthewild66654:25-4:35 in the video shows aircraft sextants being used in flight. They were mostly used about 50 years ago when navigators were part of the flight crew.
@@giftofthewild6665
They were used in space crafts...
Oh God! I forgot about pressure nav.
Not a pilot but I love learning about aviation and Navigation. It adds to the "useless info" that I use or share with others when they say..."how do they do that?"
One day you'll be halfway through a transpacific flight and the captain will get on the intercom and say, "Attention passengers, do we have a Quantum Navigation System expert onboard?"
@@DemPilafian Reminds me of those ads "You too can be a Quantum Mechanic!"
To me it's not about sharing it with others, it's to better understand my reality. I think that's where all conspiracy theories like flat earth come from, the complete lack of basic understanding of how stuff works. If you lack that knowledge AND you lose your trust in authority, you can be easily persuaded into any conspiracy.
@@mofayerActually, I think it’s about epistemology. By that, I mean it’s not a question of what you know. It’s a question of, “do you understand what knowledge is and how it’s acquired?”
When you don’t, you think your own belief is knowledge and others’ knowledge is belief.
A person with little knowledge could still have good epistemology. Flat earthers don’t believe that garbage because they lack knowledge. Rather, they don’t even know what knowledge is, and why someone else’s “knowledge” might be better than theirs. The distrust in authority you refer to stems from a misunderstanding of what knowledge is and an inability to distinguish it from mere belief. Why trust someone who presents belief as fact when their beliefs are no more justified than your own and they may have ulterior motives?
That’s how a person with bad epistemology thinks. It’s not the unknowing that’s dangerous, it’s the certainty.
I also think flat earthers are narcissistic sociopaths who need to invent reasons to feel superior, but that’s another discussion.
@@DemPilafianYes! I am certified in this and happy to help out on the flight deck. Let me grab my test kit from the overhead bin and tell the pilots I’ll be right up!
As a very retired airline pilot and sim instructor I found this video fascinating. Actually your description of current nav systems was one of the best I've heard in over 40 years in the industry. Keep up the good work.
If the earth were flat, nothing would exist, because cats would have knocked everything off the edge thousands of years ago.
😂
There's nothing to fear but sphere itself!
You know, he’s not wrong 😊
Love this comment, it’s so true 😂
😂😂😂 WOW
I work in Oceanographic survey and construction.
We use RLG, FOG and INS underwater. Mostly FOGs are used and preferred, out of the manufacturers we use, FOGs tend to be a more reliable name in our field however they are more sensitive to shock forces making them lose the accurate specifications though but their high accuracy is not always needed for our work.
I have heard RLGs are much more resilient as the whole mirror and laser assembly is a single glass prizm so they not going to move position away or closer to each other and they are used to aim artillery guns as they can with stand the shocks well.
As for INS we use it, but it will drift in minutes without additional sensors aiding it.
Problem underwater is GPS doesn’t reach so by using GPS to get vessel position we then use an acoustic system to get position of underwater ROVs, structures etc in relation to Vessel and fron this we can know it underwater position. But it is not accurate like GPS but it is accurate enough.
There are different acoustic systems that can be used. You can set up almost like your own temporary satellite array in a local area underwate but the method im most used to is you have vessel ping and remote beacons on underwater objects will reply back. The hydrophones (ears ) on the vessel are numerous and in an array. Depending on the timing between each hearing the reply it can calculate a direction and you can get a range based on the time from the vessel ping to the reply. This is usually done every 2-3 seconds. Remote becons do not always have a power source subsea and so it depends on how long you need the battery to last; more pings, less time you will have battery last.
However sound in water travels slow enough that delay becomes an issue especially in deep water (1000m+) like found in Gulf of Mexico, west Africa for exanple. Sound will travel about 1500m/s, but 2000m depth means possibly getting close to 3 seconds between transmit- travel down and up time- process signal time. In the real world environment it is not unusual to lose replies or chirps not be heard by beacons underwater due to other noise, and masking (not being in line of sight) so on our navigation we will see position but it will only update once every couple of seconds or so in normal use.
However if 1 or 2 of these replies are missed you go considerable time and distance if ROV is traveling where position is not known. This means rocks could appear meters away from their real location in a survey. There are ways to correct for this but correcting is not as good or accurate as getting accurate data during a survey.
This reason is why we use INS on Rov when surveying, so as to assist and it has become standard required equipment a lot of the time. It will fill in the gaps between the replies and especially if we miss replies. So instead of seeing our ROV move as a series of dots updating every few seconds- it will be a smooth line traveling as it is in real life.
They quantim navigation. I could see that making its way to my industry too as iif i understand correctly, i can see it could possibly remove some of the other equipment if it replaced INS units. It would also potentially save time and work when getting everything set up and calibrated i guess.
Back in the 1970s I flew on a Boeing 707 that was equipped with inertial navigation for trans polar flights. The system used gyroscopes and ring lasers to track the changes in position from a fixed starting point. It did drift over time but was still good enough to be within a few miles at the end of several thousand miles of flight. The difference between then and now is that the equipment fits in a shoe box today rather than completely filling an equipment bay and the space between the two pilot seats in the 707. That was also the time that the first GPS systems started to appear. You frequently had to wait six or more hours between fixes from the limited number of satellites available at the time.
Fascinating! Thank you
Did you used those eyebrows for celestial navigation?
Worst case: When there were only 4 active satellites (called SVs - space vehicles) they would only provide a "useful" solution for about 20 - 30 minutes, twice a day. The test period would move forward in time about 6 minutes every day as the orbital period wasn't exactly 12 hours. As an active test engineer back in the early GPS days we would truck out to the Yuma, AZ. test site at 3 in the afternoon grab data and return at around 3 AM and do it again. Today, with a minimum of 24 SVs (usually more than 30 now) there are usually six or more SVs in view which provide a robust solution 24/7 anywhere in the world.
@@michael2782 Until it is jammed or spoofed.
Ancient Mariner here: I remember being amazed seeing the old TRANSIT navigation box for the first time in the late sixties!
Lol loved the slight dig at flat earthers 😂
😈
Kelsey (74Gear) actually once made an entire video about it where he invited them to go on a flight with him to disprove the flat earth (if they finance it ofc)
@@_firecat_ and guess what happened? that's right, crickets.and i predict that the same is gonna happen with the final experiment. if that really happens, there won't be any flerfs on that trip.
Meh. Youll never convince them with facts or science because too many authority figures have hidden lies and schemes behind "facts" and "science". If you want to dissuade flat earth/moon hoax nonsense you first have to make "science" trustworthy again. And that means going hard on the people who abuse it to hide their agendas.
Very amusing to find the overlap of my TH-cam algorithm between Peter and the flat earth debunking channels - love it!
It fascinates me that even as our technological implementations become 'space age/futuristic' the basics remain the same. And the pilots who understand the basics will always be just a little better prepared to deal with "stuff that happens.' Thanks for another interesting video.
The well-trained pilots will KNOW when the GPS is lying to them, unlike the poorly trained ones.
I need to make a small correction. GPS is the United States' navigation system, but there are many more, such as Galileo (European), GLONASS (Russian), BeiDou (Chinese), QZSS (Japanese), and NavIC (Indian). Our mobile phones typically use all of these systems, and I believe aviation does as well. The general term for all of these navigation systems is GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System).
Aviation only uses GPS. Other systems maybe in the future.
I've covered other GNSSs in a previous video, I believe airliners today use GPS only.
the civilian motorist term for it it "Satnag"
FYI: The Garmin Aera 660 (VFR aviation navigator) supports both GPS (alone) or GPS + GLONASS.
Uncertified of course.
Just as an interesting aside, my phone uses both GPS and GLONASS. It sees the WAAS satellites but doesn't use them in its navigational solutions, alas. Right at this moment, it's using 10 GPS and 5 GLONASS satellites. It's also getting good signals from two WAAS satellites but it's not using them.
When I was flying many years ago I always flew IFR (I Follow Roads).
Lol.
About one year ago, I was doing IFR on a bicycle. Flight was very nice, but landing... was painful.
That's how I drive.
@@norbert.kiszka when i run i sometimes also fly IFR however sometimes it is more convenient to use GPS (Go Path Less) in order to fly over areas that do not have roads however it seems my brain hired ryanair pilots so the landing was quite bad causing severe damage to the underbelly of the aircraft (edit takeoff was great tho)
Was taught when I was doing my PPL, if you really lost, fly low and read the road signs. There are other old ways like NDB's and radio station freq's if you know the tower positions, but the old road sign was old faithful
There is also the Hemispherical resonator gyroscope, used on satelites and Nuclear Subs.
According to Wiki :
It is highly accurate and is not sensitive to external environmental perturbations. The resonating shell weighs only a few grams and it is perfectly balanced, which makes it insensitive to vibrations, accelerations, and shocks.
Cool
@@MentourNow HRG might be more than enough accuracy for commercial air travel, especially if Quantum Gyroscopes are cost-prohibitive. Regardless of which route (or routes) the industry moves towards, the advances in the tech overall are pretty incredible. Great video as always, and the graphics to explain the gyroscopes and older navigation methods were top notch!
Interesting... hmm that's also how the microchip ones work, through tiny, flat, resonating masses, where the flexing and deviation of velocity of differently oriented masses affects resonance, which is measured.
Thanks for that device info!
Still mechanical so subject to excessive drift.
@@rogerphelps9939 Less drift than the best laser Gyro, 1° per week according to Safran, this is why Nuclear subs use them, they can't recalibrate often due to there missions.
th-cam.com/video/fdMTKKP0d7g/w-d-xo.html
My first job out of university was as a navigator/bombardier in B52’s. Radar, celestial, and dead reckoning.
Talk about becoming technologically unemployed.
These went away, but they are going back to teaching some of these same skills to limited military personnel, as a fallback, anticipating heavy EW environments.
Dead Reckoning is still a skill everyone needs for flight planning and time off even if the entire squadron hits the waypoint in the sky to the inch. Even with real time wind indicator you still want to work out what that does to next 6 legs for time on target. If you smell the pilots aftershave in the plane ahead the GPS is still working, if a turn is made to avoid running into each other, perhaps offset from the waypoint a NM.
My grandfather was a navigator turned electronics warfare officer in the airforce. He said the laser ring gyroscope was the biggest advancement in avionics ever. Before that, with mechanical gyros, the lubricating oil the military used was a highly guarded secret both in terms of composition and location - there were heavily fortified stockpiles around the nation and only a few people knew all the locations of the gyroscope oil.
That is interesting. I’m going to look up gyroscope oil.
Considering how much oil and grease are used in gyroscopes is similar to watches, that would be 3 55 gallon barrels in Vegas, Dayton and Rapid City SD that remain their to this day.
@@christopherwhull
I took it all and used for cooking.
@@ronunderwood5771 Here is a hint, it likely wasn't even oil. It was a Fluorcarbon.
Excellent explanations!
In the early 2000’s I was on a SWA flight from Sacramento to San Diego. It was the first fight of the day for that aircraft that had the new upturned wing tips. A strong storm was passing through, with winds 35 kts and gusts up to 45 kts. As we boarded, the plane was noticeably bouncing around.
After boarding was complete, we made no move to pushback for over 30 mins when the pilot made a PA saying the aircraft was fine, but the bouncing around would not allow the three gyroscopes to synchronize and we could not take off until they all give the same result. He said the new wingtips made the plane move about more in the unusual lateral wind than the old straight wingtips.
After a few more minutes, he even moved the aircraft behind a hanger in an attempt to shelter the plane from the wind. No joy. We had to stay in the ground another hour until the storm front passed and the plane stopped bouncing around enough so the gyros synced.
Technology is nice…when it works! works. 21:12
I think it must have been attitude, heading or turn coordinator gyros. Planes have flown for decades without an IRS.
@@rickjljr11 Uh, no. IRS is pretty vital, watch from 14:36 …
@@petep.2092 No A plane flying from Sacramento to San Diego does not need an Inertial Reference System for navigation. Waypoint to waypoint (VORs) would work just fine. Or fly lower and look out the window.
@@rickjljr11You are right. You can just follow IFR Interstate 5 all the way down central and southern CA.
IRS is linked to other systems in modern airliners, if they can’t align, nothing works, it’s a safety feature
The problem with any of the current quantum technologies is, as Petter mentioned, that they need to operate at as close to absolute zero as possible. It is actually not the device that is so big, it is the cooling solution that takes up space of at least a fridge. And it usually uses a consumable (like liquid Helium) to achieve these low temperatures. It is highly questionable how far this can be shrunk down, even a size reduction by half would be great progress.
Agreed. I am dubious about Hydrogen powered flight for the same reason. It’s one thing on a rocket where you have ground equipment for the whole time and then just 1 minute of use without, but for an aircraft flying for 15 hours, how is it going to keep fuel at -200°?
@@aenguswright7336 Heavent heard about Hydrogen cars? Its just very high pressure tanks. Its one of the challanges because a safe tank is also quite heavy. We are talking MegaPascals. Accordingly these cars carry only about 5kg of hydrogen.
Edit: But planes may use combustion engines and higher cunsumption compared to cars with H-Fuelcells. For use of liquid hydrogen an option might be evaporative cooling as the gas is used. I'd guess they'll use similar storage tech to whats used in cars.
@ariantes221: Totally agree. Thank you for that comment. I was about to say the same but was scrolling in case someone already mentioned it.
You probably expected this response but is this not the exact sort of thing that was once said about home computers? They took up whole rooms, now they fit in whatever shape we want.
They aren’t consumable.
The TV limited series Master's of the Air (2024) frequently showed excellent use of Dead Reckoning Navigation, used by the American Bomber Command in WWII. It was shown in detail on almost every flight, with the Navigator making the calculations using the information he had, as well as how much trouble the rest of the crew could get in to if their Navigator was killed mid-flight.
Yep, dead reckoning is an art form
i knew "dead" would come into it somehow.
My father was a Coastal Command navigator in WW2 flying B-24 Liberators over the Atlantic Ocean looking for U-boats. They used to fly search patterns for 10-12 hours a few hundred feet above the ocean, using dead reckoning navigation. He was really good at mental arithmetic, as a trainee accountant, but the stress of being responsible for the lives of the whole crew was huge.
They were still not very accurate with bomb aiming.
@@rogerphelps9939 Yes that's why they had to have the Pathfinders.
Cryogenic cooling means it's unlikely to be taking over from GPS for anything smaller than an aircraft. I can't see anything running cryo-tanks from a battery for long.
Apart from the power requirement: cryogenic systems are hard to miniaturize. To maintain a 300 °C temperature difference requires volume for insulation.
I enjoy your show and the way you present information, however, I have a couple of comments regarding your assessment of IRS systems:
• I’ve been hearing about “cold atom” navigation (you referred to it as quantum nav) for nearly 20 years. I’m glad it’s finally coming to fruition.
• FOG is not an improvement to RLG. Both systems are spec’d to 0.8nm/hr drift. NGC went full in with FOG while Honeywell stuck with RLG. Honeywell owns the commercial market.
• FOG is not preferred by space applications. Space tends toward Hemispherical Resonator Gyroscope (HRG) “wine glass” systems.
• RLG/FOG systems cannot “detect” the earth’s rotation rate. They assume the rotation rate given the inputted initial position. In a near mishap, an F-22 pilot (in Alaska) inputted 16 degrees vice 61 degrees latitude. The system went “upside down” and the aircraft temporarily departed controlled flight.
• GPS is not “primary” in an IRS. Both inertial and GPS inputs go through a Kalman filter. Inertial is more accurate in the short term. A spurious GPS input will not send the IRS off-kilter.
• Stellar nav is extremely accurate. Several military aircraft use (e.g. LN-120) for different applications. The obvious limitation is clouds…
I’ve been out of the industry for a “few” years so my info might be a little dated. Keep up the great channel!
Ah the Kalman filter. You wouldn't believe how much tears it caused my coworkers
As a "boomer" who worked for a while at Decca when I was young, it was interesting to see a quick glimpse of one of those old nav. systems we were making that were rather "secret" at the time.
My father was a WWII era naval fighter pilot. His writing about his experience included the following:
Navigation was one of the essential flying skills you had to master in the days before GPS. A typical carrier mission required flying over a featureless ocean searching for enemy aircraft, while at the same time charting compass heading, time, and wind drift on a small pullout navigation table in the cockpit. Most importantly, you had to keep track of a floating runway that was sailing away from your starting location at 15-20 knots the whole time you were aloft. Wind drift had to be estimated by looking at ocean whitecaps and waves. So it was with some relief that you came back into visual contact with the carrier when returning from a mission, knowing that you had done your navigation calculation correctly. That relief was followed, however, by a white-knuckle landing on a runway heaving in the ocean swells.
Even just seeing the footage of the seemingly endless expanse of the ocean from a WW2 cockpit makes me feel anxious. And that’s without even having to evade fighters or AA flak. The aviators that did that over and over again blow me away with their courage, and most of them were barely out of childhood.
It's also worth pointing out that some military planes used a form of automatic celestial navigation called astro-inertial navigation. If I remember correctly the SR-71 used such a system and it's rumored that the B-2 uses such a system as well.
Doubtful. If you have tto fly low to avoid being detected by radar tthe chances are that tthe stars will be obscured by clouds. Here in he UK tthat would be a near certainty!
@@rogerphelps9939 Astrotracker system was installed on F-111 aircraft for sure. A friend in the Air Force who maintained the systems once showed me the tracker installed under the canopy and behind the pilot''s seat. This was around 1975.
@@rogerphelps9939 B2 can fly higher than many planes without being tracked and like the F117 they tend to flight at night, a celestial navigation system could be a good backup for it
@@rogerphelps9939actually the SR-71’s astro-inertial unit would start picking up stars as soon as it was pulled out of the hangar, day or night, rain or shine.
@@rogerphelps9939 modern stealth doesn’t work like that. You don’t need to fly low for stealth to be effective. That was a tactic used by non stealth planes to evade radar. Stealth planes should remain far away from any sensors that can pick them up so flying low would be unadvisable. Also Astro-inertial navigation doesn’t require constant visibility of the sky. As the name implies it uses a mix of inertial navigation and celestial navigation to work. As long as there’s sky visibility once in a while navigation accuracy should remain high.
Thanks Petter, great story.
I started my career on 747 classics with Carousel IV inertial systems, watched then as we moved on to the dramatic improvement with Laser ring gyros, and then finally GPS came into the mix. Then in the early 2000s we were the first airline in the Southern hemisphere to train on and use RNP approaches. I’m now retired since 2020 (Unfortunately Covid ensured that I had to go and put my feet up- will always miss the flying, though not waking to an alarm clock.)
This looks really encouraging- hopefully it lives up to expectations in every respect.
I did a research project on this tech (ring trap Bose-Einstein Condensates) 10 years ago, cool to see that it's being implemented now.
An issue is decoherence, or the atom bunches becoming less quantum and useful due to eg warning up. At the time, that was projected to be on the order of months in real deployments
So could some longevity be traded for cryo temperature while achieving adequate accuracy for the duration of a trans-Pacific flight plus some to bring down the size and make it more practical and feasible?
It might be a great solution. Its also worth mentioning the possibilities for automated IFR and automated celestial navigation (which is already used by satellites): the techniques of those methods, except done via cameras and a computer matches the ground features or stars to their known layout. Ground-detecting radar can perform that by matching the contours of land, forest, and buildings to the features that are expected along the route.
Automated IFR is likely used for cruise missiles and milary drones, as we expect GPS to be jammed or spoofed in their usage areas. And thougg good gyroscopes could be used, those gyroscopes are critical military technology and we dont want to risk an enemy getting them if a weapon fails to detonate. This isnt as much of a worry for a software-based system, as the software can run on RAM (non-saved memory) and be programmed by the aircraft before firing, so a saved copy is never on the weapon - and the software vanishes from RAM within minutes or seconds of the weapon losing electrical power.
Great post .. which I was about to make!
Data fusion of multiple current sensors can provide good results over land ... but over water you willalso need automated celestial navigation, as noted above.
What abpit bad weather then its unuseable
@@635574 Airliners generally cruise above all weather so that's no issue for star tracking, and with special filters they can be made to work day or night. Automated star-trackers have been around for a long time, the "astro-inertial navigation system" used in the SR-71 was derived from a system developed in the 1950s for early cruise missiles. Whenever it had a clear view of the sky (day or night) it would automatically identify, locate and track the best visible stars in its catalog and use this data to counteract any drift of the inertial navigation system.
Hej Petter! I got my PhD in quantum physics decades ago, and while I still have to check out the details of this system - this seems like a truly ingenious idea. It's like someone connected two dots that appear to have nothing to do with each other. I'll dig deeper, till dess tack för videon, och ha det fint! ;)
GPS spoofing can easily be detected, we just don't do it yet.
An aircraft needs two GPS antennas, one pointing at the sky and the other one pointing to the ground.
Under normal circumstances the ground antenna receives no signal (no spoofing).
If all of a sudden there's a strong GPS signal coming from the ground, we know there's a spoofing in progress, the aircraft can then disregard those data and revert to inertial navigation until the spoofing has gone away.
Better still have the antenna pointed at space shielded from the ground and unless you are flying your jammer in the sky it wont cause a problem for planes. The problem is the use of omni directional antennas. You also can't spoof Galileo because its cryptographicaly signed and the jammers wont have access to the private keys.
There are actually legit GPS sending antennas on the ground. That is called differential GPS, which is used to enhance the GPS signal.
@@bernds6587 Which works on completely different frequencies with a completely different format and is not required for aircraft positioning. They are primarily for making GPS accurate enough for surveying and dates from before selective availability was turned off. With the advent of Galileo and refreshed GLONASS it is not actually required.
I purchased a hobby sparkfun GPS to survey with. Out of the box it's accurate to 120mm. With a little extra money the error can be reduced to a couple of centimeters or less. The protocol that makes this possible is called RTK and relies on a second GPS unit to detect the drift in the satellite orbit. The correction can be handled with a cell phone, a radio link modem and it is even available from a satellite. How you do it depends on where you are and what you're willing to pay for the additional accuracy. At the moment, I am cheap and a 5 inch or less of error is acceptable for my needs. I just need to know how badly the fence installers messed up. On the other hand, another professional surveyor is off by 20 feet.
@@jonathanbuzzard1376 i'm sure all of the GNSS broadcasts both encrypted and unencrypted signals. the unencrypted for civilian use which should be easily spoofed
further, jamming does not require knowing the encryption key
There is also another type of navigation being studied that is based on pulsars and quasars in outer space. It's essentially an unjammable combination of GPS (where the pulsars are the satellites) and celestial navigation. Celestial drift is very slow and easy to correct for.
I worked for Northrop for 34 years. The changes in the technology was amazing to work with. RLGs were very work intensive, because of the cleanliness requirements before the system is sealed. Other products with fiber optical unit changed the applications possible for improvement. It was all very interesting work. I have been in this type of work for 45 plus years.
I've been in the navigation industry since 1977. This is in the oilfield and river crossing industries. Ring laser gyros have entered our market about 15 years ago but are still not the primary method for steering the bore as it were. This is primarily due to a company holding a monopoly on the technology. Well that has now come to an end and we have our first ring laser steering tool. This video that you produced is the first thing that really helped me understand how they work. Even though I have found your videos to be my favorite, this one blows everything else out of the water for me as it relates directly to what I do and answered so many questions. I've gone from being a big fan to a super fan! Keep it up.
In the 1980’s, the airport that I worked at lost the ILS to our primary runway. The FAA tried to schedule the outage during good weather months but it ran over time and budget. With no RNAV approach published (it took about two years to publish a new approach procedure at the time) we were left with ASR approaches as the only option for flight crews when the ceiling or visibility dropped. We have come a long long way since then.
Phased array recievers for GPS are probably an easier to impliment solution. Much harder to spoof GPS signals when you can filter out certain directions, and GPS jamming tends to come from below.
I also heard 'near absolute zero' which is an engineering headache that might keep quantum gyroscopes beyond the reach of practical aircraft navigation. (Fridge sized experimental systems non withstanding.)
This is something I have wondered a long time. Why not use directional GPS receivers? That would block out most of the spoofing and interference.
Or add a new GPS protocol that includes a cryptographic signature that could be checked against a public key.
@@dbattleaxe That wouldn't stop jamming. If you think so I don't think you understand jamming.
I work for an alarm company and they use encrypted wifi or other signals with encryption between devices in the home. Jamming can still disrupt the signals.
Basically if you have a radio signal on a frequency with information. You just overwhealm the signal with a much stronger one so none of the original information on the frequency can be picked up.
Like if someone whispers to you from the other side of the street and someone else yells as loud as they can in your ear. You wont hear a thing from the whisper.
Doesn't matter if you use a code in your whisper.
@@SonnyKnutson Yeah, but it would stop spoofing. More than one solution can be applied.
@@dbattleaxe Could potentially stop spoofing yes. But making that change would require all devices all over the world to get an update. It would slow down performance. It would increase requirements of satelites because encryption is a LOT more computationally intensive. So a lot of satelites would probably need to be replaced. And all of them updated as well.
Not an easy task though.
When I learned to fly (just after the Wright brothers LoL!) it was radio beacons and look-out-of-the windshield. In my work as an ecologist GPS was the eighth wonder of the world when it first appeared, and this episode has been a real insight as to where we are and what is to come. In view of how rapidly technology is advancing, it won't surprise me of the quantum inertial systems are in use surprisingly soon. Thank you for your excellent channels.
The implications of this for tactical/strategic aviation are huge too. A lot of important targets are defended by GPS jamming to complicate targeting and weapons guidance.
Sounds amazing! The main issue here is temperature management. Keeping the Q-INS system at near absolute zero would likely be difficult, heavy, expensive, and need a robust independent power backup. Unless and until they can make it work at near-room temperature, this is a major hurdle. Even today's IRUs need constant cooling and they don't need to be anywhere near Zero Kelvin. I really like these informative videos, keep them coming!
Nice to hear about new technology as an alternative. Im not a aviator but Im a pilot boat driver in the gulf of Finland and we are getting spoofed several times weekly, being thrown about one to two miles around of the actual position. Thank you Petter
Is LORAN-C gone now? Oh... LORAN-C navigation was state of the art back then. good ol' days...
They were taken off line in 2010.
eLoran could replace it and would offer a good and inexpensive backup to GPS that'd be hard to jam. But Congress hasn't funded it.
I lived a cuple of hundred meters from a 412m high Loran-C tower close to Hellissandur, Iceland. When it was built it was the largest structure in europe and still is the 4th largest. But the plan is taking it down soon.
@@Inkling777 That was probably because for a ground station based radionavigation system like Loran-C was to have a high precision and a long range you need to have a very uniform evenly reflective flat terrain. Basically it will only work good over the ocean. But that is exactly where GPS spoofing/jamming is the least likely to happen and where it will cause the least trouble if it even happens. Basically even with all the imperfections and limitations GPS just made Loran-C completely irrelevant and obsolete for all purposes.
Some ten years ago it was modernized in North East Asia for use by shipping. Japan, China and the countries in between agreed to continue its use.
I worked with Inertial Nav equipment in the early 70's. (Polaris and Poseidon fire control) I love this overview and it is exciting to see how far things have come. Good work!!!
very interesting video as usual! quick question: at 13:54 in the video, how were you able to show the IRS position? didn't know that was possible!
You just push the “pos” button on the EFIS control panel
@@MentourNow cool! thanks for the info :)
As a UK licenced Avionics Engineer I retired 20 years ago and very impressed by the advancement of aircraft navigation systems over this time. I was also one of the first commercial pilots to use GPS in my private aircraft in the 1980's. Your taĺk was very well presented.
The Gyro in a model helicopter ist absolutly correct. After 100 loopings it knows exactly the position of the helicopter. This is needed for a rescue button. You can see a test in the video 'Vstabi NEO rescue Logo 600 SX'. This flight computer has more computer power than a B2 Spirit. It was developed in Hanau near Frankfurt/Main / Germany where I live.
The drift issue only really materializes after a longer period. For instance todays aviation grade IRS drift values in a flying aircraft is >0.6nm/hr or >0.01°/hr. The absolute positional deviation is of course smaller for a slower vehicle. Also drift doesn't necessarily occure perfectly linear and the deviation effective deviation can even reduce over time. How long does an RC-Helicopter fly and how fast is it and how far does it move away from the initial position?
A) there's no such thing as absolutely correct instruments. B) I'm a developer of one of the primary firmware systems used in RC aircraft - the accelerometers and gyros (IMUs) typically used, without GPS and compass, are accurate enough to navigate for maybe 100-200 meters before you start going well off track. This is due to the double integration problem.
If there is accelerometer error of say 1%, so it reads 1.01G instead of 1.00G, that very small error in the accelerometer reading means the system falsely reads 0.01G of acceleration in some random direction. That tiny amount of acceleration over a 5 or 10 minute period translates to significant speed.
So you soon have a medium amount of speed error, thinking you're traveling 65 MPH north when you're actually hovering still. Calculating position from that, the system thinks it's been going 40 MPH or 60 MPH or whatever for the last 5-10 minutes - that's a big error in position. 8-10 miles of positional error in 10 minutes. All from a 1% error in acceleration reading, because that error is compounded twice on every loop of the firmware.
This is MEMS micro electro-mechanical Systems where small vibrating beam gros and PEGA accelerometers are made part of Integrated circuits. The are also Magnetometers and tilt meters. Perfectly good for missile guidance as well as drones and model aircraft.
The first method is "pilotage". I flew a 707 (Flt. Engr.) that had a dome for celestial nav for crossing oceans, in the DC-12 we had 3 INS units. Finally in the 777 I flew the latest in "ring laser gyros". OF course I used all of the other methods you explained. Nice description of the RLGs.
Fun Fact : The Lockheed SR-71 spyplane also used the stars for navigating (even during the day !) , among other methods I imagine.
at the altitudes they flew at, the sky is much darker than here on the surface. apparently dark enough to see some stars.
@@mrxmry3264 Well, you are correct. But from what I've read, their star tracker was actually able to see the stars from the ground, before takeoff. I'd find a reference for you if I could but I'm sure I read that. [EDIT] The stars were sighted through a special quartz window (located behind the RSO cockpit) and there was a special star tracker that could see the stars even in daylight.’
@@mrxmry3264 Search for "SR-71 star tracker from the ground" in google ;-)
@@b1lleman it could see stars during the day on the ground? how is that possible?
the only way i can think of is if the wavelengths of the blue sky are filtered out, leaving only longer wavelengths not coming in from the atmosphere.
@@mrxmry3264 All valid questions, I don't know myself ;-) I have some books to read on the subject so I might be able to come back here if I remember to do so .....
Former Naval Flight Officer who did a tour instructing at the joint Air Force/Navy Navigation training squadron. To give you an idea of how accurate celestial navigation is, any cel fix within 15 NM of the actual position was passing, within 7NM was considered excellent. Our flights using cel had clearance 20NM either side of centerline, and we routinely had to ask for more so the students wouldn’t know exactly how lost they were.
Fantastic Episode - Really appreciate it.
Kindly consider doing an in-depth series of episodes on the currently used navigation systems - That will be very very interesting.
Thanks for the great work n videos you so precisely n passionately put together. 👌🏼
Noted! Thanks for the suggestion!
Not a pilot here, but a data scientist. An av-fan and a quantum enthusiat. I really enjoyed this video ❤
Thanks Petter!!
Please bear in mind that Ring Laser and Fibre Optic Gyro based Inertial Guidance systems are currently graded according to their accuracy/ drift rate.
The better the accuracy / lower drift rate, the higher the grading/ category.
Very high grade units have export restrictions and are prohibited for use in the US/Europe for anything other than military equipment.
Commercial airliners are not allowed to use these "high grade" units, not only because of the cost, but because of the risk of theft by "bad" actors/countries.
So I never expect to see these quantum gyros in aircraft, even if the cost comes down.
If they did, Russia / China/ N. Korea / Iran would scavenge the parts for military uses.
You could probably rent one from the Taliban in Afghanistan.
I remember reading something where RLGs in general were heavily restricted to the point of being a classified tech until some openness program in collaboration with Russia on the ISS in the 1990's. I think they traded some rocket engine stuff within the joint venture for access to that? It's funny how things rolled back diplomatically again, so we probably wont see that kind of thing happening again soon.
I’m a long-retired pilot and as such found this video fascinating. You certainly do your research, and the presentation is first class! When I retired GPS was really only just coming on line as a mainstream airline system. It always has worried me that we went from fully a self-contained system (INS) to a satellite-based system, and I’m heartened to hear that self-containment for air navigation is making a return. Thank you so much for sharing! ❤
Thank you for the much more respectful introduction of DR plots, this time (2:54)!
GPS is not the only game in town. The ESA runs the Galileo network independent of the American GPS on different frequencies with its own set of satellites. However because the Galileo signals are still quite week, they can be jammed about as easily at GPS.
Probably good to note that Feynman won a Nobel prize for his work in quantum mechanics, for him to say that quote
True that!
By the way, his name is pronounced Fine men, not Fay men. @MentorNow. Just FYI.
As I recall, the triple laser IRS system in the eighties had a sinusoidal error and consequently was not cumulative but variable over time.
I remember an episode of The Big Bang Theory in which Howard and Raj are working on quantum navigation. It's kind of impressive how much science/tech reality was embedded in that show.
I remembered the same episode. "The Death Star in Star Trek ..."
Actually famously Raj was not part of that project 🤓
that is exactly the comment I was going to make. Brilliant series. All twelve lol
"Infinite Persistence Gyroscope"
I currently live in Finland and the amount of spoofing and jamming in this region coming from Russia is crazy. Finnair and others have given up flying to some airports in Finland and Estonia as the parameters have gone beyond safe levels. If I remember then these are smaller airports without state of the art landing systems so they require GPS to give valid info for passenger planes.
I get the feeling that it would be prudent to use all of them at the same time.
- A camera on the aircraft scans the ground features (assuming over land flight) and matches those ground features with a mapping database specifically set up for this purpose.
- Another camera on the aircraft scans the skies for signatures of stars, even in daylight because that's actually possible, and uses celestial navigation to determine your location.
- Inertial systems (of varying accuracy, just redundant) are tracking your progress.
- GPS does GPS things.
- Radio beacons do radio beacon things.
- Pilots do pilot things.
- Pitot tubes measure airspeed.
- All other sensors one can think of measures altitude (including lidar) and whatnot.
Everyone TOGETHER paints a picture of where the aircraft is at the specific moment in time, its speed, elevation and PYR etc etc.
And if one system deviates from the average of all other systems, that system is deemed untrustworthy, but not completely blocked, just not trustworthy and you get a "trustworthy" measurement, a "combined measurement" and a "possibly incorrect" measurement from the untrusted source.
The pilot is the final deciding factor. We still can't beat humans when it comes to automated/smart systems. As evident by the pilots clearly knowing they are at 30,000 feet and still getting terrain warnings.
And the horror cases where an aircraft will pull down because it thinks it's going to stall when clearly it isn't going to stall and so it plummets into the ground and the pilots can do nothing but ride along...
Either way, we should not be working to trust any one system. No matter how accurate and incorruptible it is. Systems fail, people fail, the world ends around us and the systems and people are all we got.
Redundancy is the point here. No one system should have a veto over the people it's serving. And at the same time, no one person should have a veto over all other people and systems.
For example, when flying in the clouds. You as a person really have no option but to trust your instruments. As a person you could be flying upside down (in a loop for G force reasons) and still think you are in level flight going towards Gran Canaria.
With redundancy, you can see that the ONLY one who is wrong here is YOU. Since all other systems agree that you are currently doing an inverse loop-de-loop and so you really should start trusting the systems COMBINED reports.
The "terrain, PULL UP" warnings are pretty damn annoying too BTW.
If i am flying in a tunnel, the LAST thing i want to do is PULL UP.
The warning should instead inform me that i need to PAY ATTENTION. And then it should state a reason for the warning. But it shouldn't be telling me what to do.
PAY ATTENTION, TERRAIN IMPACT IN 2 MINUTES.
PAY ATTENTION, POSSIBILITY OF STALL DETECTED.
PAY ATTENTION, YOU FORGOT TO CALL YOUR WIFE.
PAY ATTENTION, BANK ANGLE.
PAY ATTENTION, POSSIBLE GPS FAILURE.
PAY ATTENTION, FUEL LEVEL.
and so on.
Agree on all the points except the last one, airbus warnings/cautions are are designed very well imo, there are varying degrees of “pay attention” communicated by the aircraft. You cant call them all “pay attention” as some may need more attention than others and more importantly, some are more urgent than others. In your example, “bank angle” and “terrain impact in 2 mins” should not be grouped in the same category as the first onlynrequires you to lessen bank angle but the second is imminent death
When I was in the oilfield, we used mechanical gyros to do orientations and surveys. The tool had to be calibrated before each job and high sided onsite to set a reference orientation. It was sensitive enough to detect the rotation of the earth. Magnetic measurement tools do not work in steel casing, only open hole. Gyros are amazing devices
If it works, it will be made smaller very quickly. It's not about a plane or a submarine... if you can put the thing into a missile, you can have a completely unjammable cruise missile that follows terrain in 30m height and hits a preprogrammed target with an unprecedented accuracy. It would be the perfect "remove exactly this building and this building only"-weapon.
Not much help if you’re fighting an enemy that uses everyday itsms to cause catastrophic chaos and doesnt card about precision strikes.
The weaponised human is pretty hard to stop
I noticed one interesting thing, after having watched this video and going to researchgate, namely: most of the research that shows up in the search results regarding this topic, is coming from Teheran... 🤔
I think I know how Iran wants to use this technology...
Missiles already use encrypted GPS and an IRS systems. Spoofing isn't possible and if the signal is jammed, the IRS takes over until GPS can be reestablished. Jamming is difficult because the antenna is pointed up limiting the effect that a ground system would have and as the jamming would take place near the target, there isn't much time to accumulate errors. It's already been battle tested and works well enough for the military. Non military aircraft can't use encryption and need something that will work over a longer range so what is good for the military isn't going to work in non military applications.
@@denawiltsie4412 encrypted GPS? Do you know how GPS works?
Antenna points up? Do you know how GPS antenna directivity works?
@@denawiltsie4412 Encrypted GPS signals can be half-аss spoofed, where the original signal just gets recorded and gets resend with a delay making it look like the aircraft is further away from a satellite. It's crude, but it's something.
And just jamming by sending out garbage signals can also be done.
I work as an aircraft engineer in line maintenance. On a daily base we deal with „GPS“ failure messages since a few months. So, YES, I‘d love to see the IRS as a primary navigation again. I can remember my first aeronautical modules and my first type training on the A320, where the GPS was the backup system - the good old times!!
Loved the flat earth reference. Thanks for sharing.
Glad you enjoyed it! 💕
Flat-earthery will get you nowhere! 🤣
It would be amazing for subterranean navigation. Go into a cave system and your "GPS" could create a track and you could always find your way out and map at the same time.
That's how directional drilling works.
INS on fighters in 1970's. We always said inertial system just works out where it isn't then can say where it is. Looks like we had quantum already in those days!
Interestingly, we use the same navigation techniques when sailing. Of course, everything is much slower on a boat, but we use a combination of dead reckoning, forward bearings, back bearings and transits to locate ourselves when sailing.
It really is too bad that countries like Russia and China feel the need to deploy large GPS jamming equipment, but here we are.
One of the reasons there was so much research in to inertial navigation with cellphones about a decade ago is because if it had been accurate enough it would have made indoors navigation possible, but due to the drift in current MEMS based sensors it's never been accurate enough to be useful. Purely inertial based navigation where you only need to know where you started from and would then know on an atomic level how you moved to pinpoint your exact location is pretty much the holy grail of navigation systems.
I think MEMS is at about 0.5m/sec drift (about 1 knot) drift per hour. Much better can be achieved apparently. 1 nautical mile drift per hours is about where inertial navigation was in the 1990s. It's enough for Surface to Air and Anti Tank Missile guidance or the takeover if there is a short GPS drop out.
Incredibly interesting information. Given how long it has taken just to get a 25 hour CVR, I wonder how long it will take for this type of technology to make its way through the bureaucratic behemoths?!
Does this technology only solve lateral navigation? The final report of NSZ4311 brought up some interesting issues around the vertical component.
Hi Petter, I don't know if you've come across something called Kalman Filtering, but It is a statistical method of using probability to estimate errors in control systems and has been used for many years in aircraft navigation systems. Certainly the Panavia Tornado used Kalman Filtering in its navigation computers to process the data from various systems and sensors including the Inertial Navigation Unit to get the best estimate of position. This was before the days of GPS which doesn't have the issue of cumulative errors, but I would believe the technique is still employed in the Inertial Navigation Systems of modern aircraft as a backup against loss of GPS.
Any chance you could react to Die Hard 2? Terrorists spoofed an entire airport & crashed a plane by altering ground level. Always wondered how realistic it is.
I'll see what I can do... but a quick answer is that it's not very realistic... 😂
One could only set the groundlevel downwards to make planes crash on ILS landings - but then there is the radio altimeter, which also needs to be jammed (maybe by a G5 transmitter ;-) )
@@Spechtlerimwald
ISL uses multiple radio signal beams. It doesn't transmit data. An over simplified explanations is that it is like following a laser beam down to the landing. (See explanations on this or other channels.) To give a false low elevation the slope angle transmitter antenna would basically need to be buried under ground by that amount. It would be much easier to change the angle, direction or origin of the beams than the elevation of the origin of the beam.
G5 broadband only interferences with radio altimeters when they use the same frequency. This was only ever an issue in the USA. Even in the USA not all G5 was on the same frequency that some radio altimeters used. Last the USA FAA has required some "fix" of this issue. I don't know what that fix was. But the "fix" / change was an FAA change not an FCC change.
@@erniecolussy1705 well, I meant the famous "terrain ahead, pull up" @>10000ft, which is due to a spoofed GPS signal and may also inhibit autoland/ILS even though the radio altimeter still gives correct data ...
The combined quality and frequency of Petter's videos is so very impressive!
Your primary navigation means is not GPS, but GNSS as GPS is only one of the many satellite constellations providing PNT.
True, but GPS is a common colloquialism
Yeah, I have covered that in many if my previous videos. I just referenced GPS because its what most people recognize and what we use in the Boeing I fly.
This is true in concept. Several times in the last few years, both Galileo and GLONASS had multi-day outages. Did anybody notice?
I suppose that's the question, it's not always the case that if you have GPS you have all the other systems. It's entirely possible for a navigation system to not listen to the other GNSS systems. But it also makes me wonder if airlines should reduce their dependence on GPS alone. Perhaps they could adopt the secure Galileo signal?
But it's also worth noting that many countries are exploring land based navigation signals again, so something like eLORAN might be making a comeback.
"A trademark is prone to genericization when a brand name acquires substantial market dominance or mind share, becoming so widely used for similar products or services that it is no longer associated with the trademark owner, e.g., linoleum, bubble wrap, thermos, taser." (Wikipedia).
The same can be said about GPS, pedantics can cry all about it but can't change it. The layperson calls any satellite navigation "GPS" and that's it.
Quick OCD observation - the angular velocity at the equator is 15 degrees per hour, which is the same at any latitude. Tangential velocity is what changes.
There are ways to decide whether a GPS beam is reliable or spoofed. Each beam has identifying information and it can be determined if it is orbiting Earth at some 7 m/s or static on Earth. Equipment that analyzes these signals and, for example, only uses signals from space unless an airport has a well-known GPS beam should be possible to make in a matter of months.
Are you talking about the dappled shift in the signal? Because a sophisticated spoofer could fake that too.
Doppler... stupid auto correct
@@tomyochum No, the signal from a GPS transmitter contains the precise coordinates of where the transmitter is. Comparing the coordinates of successive messages will tell you the velocity of the transmitter, and the velocity and approximate coordinates of each transmitter are known. You cannot spoof all of those details in a credible way, all at the same time.
@@andresvillarreal9271 No, the precise coordinates are not sent. The message basically says "I'm satellite X and the time is Y". You use the satellite ephemeris data to compute the location of satellite X at time Y. Then you can compute a pseudo-range to the satellite.
@@tomyochum This is a distinction without a difference. The satellite transmits the ephemeris data from which you calculate the position, so indirectly the satellite transmits the position. It is like sending me the map of a highway and telling me how many meters you have traversed on the highway. I have to do some calculations, but the map and the distance traveled tell me exactly where you are.
We use GNSS for vertical grade control . Around 10 years ago we noticed some vertical elevation drift. Our location is close to a USMC test site . When they testing F35 electronic warfare systems our GNSS system experienced a huge lack of integrity. So out come our old school laser grade control units .
Your presentation is on of best ever.
As others have mentioned, calling all global navigation systems "GPS" is extremely inaccurate. GPS itself is actually the most outdated and inaccurate system. Galileo goes to ~20cm precision on the publicly available version. Aircraft can use that even without differential techniques, which of course eliminates the need for ground stations
I have covered this in many of my previous videos.. we use GPS because thats what most people recognize but GNSS is probably better
Everybody in the aviation industry uses GPS as a term to cover all GNSS. You're splitting hairs.
To prevent spoofing, GPS receivers can also use beam forming to make it so that GPS signals can only be received from directions where satellites were; GPS can also be augmented with sidechannel signatures for GPS messages.
Traveling at approximately a 600mph at altitude with say a nice tail wind the aircraft is covering 880' per second. I'm amazed piolets can be thinking ahead of position in real time. Blink and your hundreds of feet away from point you closed your eyes. Taking into account how fast out brains perceive reality, piolets are amazing. Thank You one and all.
9:13 His depiction of the two beams turning on and off is not the way the RLG works. The timing in the RLG is is achieved by detecting phase differences between the two beams thus causing an interference pattern. Think of it this way. We send out two waves in opposite directions around a loop or ring, if they arrive at the detector at the same time the waves overlap perfectly (in phase) so that crests (high points) line up with crests and troughs (low points) line up with troughs, so the waves generate an interference pattern. If one beam is delayed due to rotation, i.e., it travels a longer distance, then the waves do not line up perfectly and the interference pattern changes. Analysis of this change gives the rate of rotation. There is not any real timing as you might think of using a stopwatch, rate of rotation is accomplished by the analysis of the interference patterns. This is the result of a phenomenon called the "Sagnac Effect."
Here is an example that is similar. I used to have my students measure the speed of light right in the hallway of the science building. It was always exciting to be able to measure of of the fundamentals and most important constants in the universe using a few hundred dollars of equipment set up in a hallway. here is how it was done, which is not that dissimilar to the way an RLG works. We used a LASER which could be modulated, i.e., we could impress a wave of known frequency on it so the intensity (brightness) varied with a known timing. The wave was split by a beam splitter with one beam going directly into a simple photocell detector. The second beam was sent up the hallway a known distance and reflected back to a second detector. Thetwo signals were fed into an oscilloscope which displayed them as two waves. The wave that traveled down the hallway was delayed slightly and so it was shifted slightly in the display. Knowing the scan rate of the oscilloscope allowed the students to determine the travel time difference. Speed is distance divided by time, so they could now determine the speed of light. It worked quite well with errors averaging about ten percent (10%) which is very good for such a simple setup.
If we had more sophisticated (meaning prohibitively more expensive) equipment we could have analyzed an interference pattern as the RLG does and gotten much more precise and accurate results. By the way, precision and accuracy are NOT the same. Accuracy is a measure of how close your measurements are to the correct value. Precision is how fine they are. By that I mean that being able to measure to the nearest ounce is more precise than measuring to the nearest pound. A postal scale used to measure the weight of letters in ounces and fractions of an ounce is more precise than a bathroom scale used to measure the weight of people in pounds
Wouldn't these things be REALLY expensive? Like, having a device with a space inside of it that is constantly kept at almost absolute zero... that must need a lot of power and precision engineering, which isn't cheap
nobody said it had to be at zero temperature, but rather a almost vacuum
Yep, but then again - All new technologies are very expensive in the beginning
@@AnomymAnonym Most quantum devices (computers, these gyro’s etc) currently only work when cooled to as close to 0 Kelvin as possible, a vacuum is not enough.
Surprisingly, the coldest known place in the entire universe, by far, is on Earth in these devices.
@@AnomymAnonym16:44
Also, from an article about the test:
On the flights were Infleqtion’s ‘Tiqker’ optical atomic clock and “a tightly confined ultra-cold-atom-based quantum system”, according DSIT, which said: “Portable production of ultra-cold atoms is key piece of the puzzle. Ultra-cold atoms are ideal for building quantum accelerometers and gyroscopes.”
@@d.sherman8563 ah, i didn't know that, i stand corrected then, thanks
Actually, a GPS satellite doesn’t report its location. It only reports the time from its atomic clock. By comparing the differing time signals from four satellites which are known to all have agreeing clocks, you can triangulate (quadranglulate? rectangulate?) your position in 4D spacetime. 😊
The receiver *has* to know where each satellite is at the time the time signal is received. Each satellite transmits data about its position and orbital parameters (it's ephemeris) continually over a number of transmitted "frames", and it takes about 30 seconds to transmit the complete data set. Finding your position from at least 4 (it needs at least 4 to be able to correct your receiver's clock) satellites is know as Trilateration.
trilateration is the algorithm.
10:42 no one on the team noticed the Earth being mirrored? thats so funny
Yeah, I noticed that too. The texture on the earth is indeed mirrored, however the arrows indicating spin direction seem correct.
I’m an aero systems engineer with a military background. Of course this us super useful for navigation particularly for the military, initially, then in commercial navigation to be sure. Excellent video.
The main concern I see in the future with GNSS jamming or spoofing, is that a bad actor could spoof the location of the aircraft in a way that gradually deviates from the real location. If the deviation occurred over the course of an hour, who would notice it? The inertial navigation system would also re-calibrate itself off the new location(s). That location deviation could be the difference between flying in hostile airspace or not.
This is the present, not the future. However, it has to be honed for a particular target and you have to follow that target. Meaning, if there aren't fighters with jammers on your tail, this isn't something that can happen to a civilian aircraft. And if there are, they can simply tell you where you have to fly and land
Switch to Galileo which is cryptographicaly signed so unless you have access to the private key which a bad actor wont you cannot spoof the signal as the signature check would fail and you know the signal is spoofed.
@@jonathanbuzzard1376 it doesn't help. Spoofing retransmits real signals which is why military GPS with encrypted signal is also disabled by ECM just fine
@@NJ-wb1cz you cannot spoof an encrypted signal because it will fail the cryptographic check so you know you are spoofed. You can still jam the signal, but just stop using an omnidirectional antenna and you solve that problem too unless the jammer is moved above you which in a plane at 30,000ft is hard. The proble is commercial aviation use GPS which is not encrypted they need to switch to Galileo which is and they use omnidirectiknal antennas, they need to switch to directional antennas that are pointing into space. Do that and the jamming spoofing problem goes away.
@@jonathanbuzzard1376 take the signal and retranslate it. All your checks succeed. This is literally already being done and why lots of high tech weapons like excaliburs that use encrypted gps completely failed in Ukraine
One feature of the INS (Inertial Nav System) on the L-1011 that most customers selected was 'self correction'. After a long flight when you parked at the gate, you would manually enter Lat Long. You used the Lat Long from a sign at the gate. The computer would compare its last known position with the one entered manually. The difference would be used by the computer to compensate for drift error. After about 4 flights it became amazing accurate. Except for one bug. The Lat Long manually entered from the sign's info at the gate were wrong. Some one finally figured that out and the correct Lat Long was placed on the signs.
"VFR" has nothing to do with navigation. It is a set of rules for flying while not under positive control and in non-instrument conditions. What you are talking about is called "pilotage".
Its more commonly referred to as VFR navigation, at least among my colleagues
And you think flying visually doesn't require 'navigation' ?
Time to head back to flight school. Or any other like a maritime academy...
Wrong. It's an iconic Honda V4 motorcycle.
@@martientazelaar6733 After 36 years as an airline pilot and 24,000 hrs. in jet transports, I don't think I need to head back to school. Do you understand the difference between FAA rules for meteorological conditions and a means of navigation? From the FAA: "VISUAL FLIGHT RULES- Rules that govern the procedures for conducting flight under visual conditions. The term “VFR” is also used in the United States to indicate weather conditions that are equal to or greater than minimum VFR requirements. In addition, it is used by pilots and controllers to indicate type of flight plan."
@@CockpitScenes I'm sure you're a big boy.
1st method mentioned, locating ground features on a map, is called pilotage. VFR means you are maintaining visibility and cloud separation requirements, regardless of navigation method.
Thank you. This was nicely presented (Naturally there are many aspects of inertial navigation not mentioned, but then again, this is for public consumption.) Retired Boeing Flight Analyst. Ken
Great video! I worked on flight simulators in the Air Force in the early eighties, before GPS. The navigation system used was inertial, but you had to manually enter your starting position. During a mission, the radar could be used to find a particular reference point. Then the WSO would put the crosshairs on the feature in order to correct for any drift or inaccuracy that accumulated during the mission. The simulation available today can be on a laptop. Back then we needed a room the size of a basketball court to fit all the electronics and computers to do the job.
So this is where my avgeek and space geek stuff comes together… The first inertial navigation system using fixed axis gyros and early computers was developed by Charles Draper at MIT and in 1953 was used to fly a B-29 from Boston to LA. It was called SPIRE. The plane appeared to be flying off course towards the end of the flight, but it was simply correcting for sidewinds. Cleared the clouds and they had the destination airport in sight. This system is why MIT got the first contract from NASA for the Apollo program long before any other contracts were signed, and with IBM was refined down to what was used in Apollo and later spaceflight. The starting point was programmed into the computers on the Saturn rocket instrument unit (the stage separator above the second stage). The instrument unit had multiple prisms around it with lasers on the ground pointed at them and these triangulated precisely the rocket’s angles, and then the computer knew how to roll and pitch the rocket using the gimballed F-1 and J-2 engines to orbit using the guidance gyros until the instrument unit was jettisoned. The instrument unit also had rate gyros which sent one electrical pulse for every 0.5g so the rocket knew its velocity so it could control the fuel flow to the engines. The loop from the instrument unit to the engines and back was 2 seconds due to the limitations of the computers then which is why Apollo astronauts described it feeling like being on a freight train. Another smaller inertial navigation system was inside the command module where it was programmed using celestial navigation and 3 points - 2 known stars and KSC in Florida. On Apollo 8, Jim Lovell at one point accidentally told the computer it was back on the pad before correcting it. The comment above about the lasers and prisms - when “guidance is internal” is heard before launch - that’s when the lasers were no longer used and it switched to the inertial guidance system. To think they did this in the 1950s and 60s.
Petter, you had me absolutely NERDING out over this video. I'm working on my PhD in physics playing with lasers and atoms and actually one recent graduate from my research group published a paper on enhancement of gyroscopic signals by multiple factors of 10 based on the quantum gyroscope you described! I can link the paper if there is enough interest, but I wanted to say you gave a wonderful introduction to quantum gyroscopes via lasers! It was so cool to see my love for quantum and aviation combined!
Also worth mentioning, quantum cryptography has been an emerging field, which allows for maximum data security against hackers, due to the fact that quantum states collapse after being observed (vaguely). the technology is far from being practical, but there is a ton of cool research happening in that field which could really enhance the security of aviation navigation systems!
Until the bad guys get their hands on quantum computers too... 😂
Very nice discussion of navigation. BTW, if any readers are in (or visiting) Washington, the Air and space museum has a whole room devoted to navigation and is well-worth a visit.
Advanced inertial navigation systems have been in use by the military for a while, and will make their way into civil aviation over time. In cruise missiles (which are just aircraft by another name) for example, the user wants the missile to have extremely precise position accuracy all the way to the 'landing." But it is very easy to jam GPS, so the last few miles to the destination cannot rely on GPS and must use some form of inertial navigation. One of the key components is the solid state gyro, similar to what you have in your cellphone. Isn't it amazing how your phone will rotate the image as you rotate your phone from portrait to landscape? I'm sure that within my lifetime we will all carry precision navigation devices that do not rely (exclusively) on GPS.
We use the IRS/INS systems on board commercial aircraft to orient the satellite communications systems that provide internet connectivity during flight. Having a precise latitude and longitude as well as info on pitch, yaw, roll, and the rate of change for those, allow the antennas to be pointed very accurately toward the desired satellite. Once the satellite is acquired the antennas will typically do closed loop tracking to maintain accurate pointing regardless of any movement of the airframe due to turbulence or flight maneuvers.
In the event that the IRS from the aircraft isn't available, the satcom system does have a back-up means of acquiring a pointing solution, but it takes longer to initially find the satellite. Given that there are typically three inertial reference units on commercial aircraft that vote between themselves, an outright failure of the IRS is really rare.
Having been retired as a Flight Dispatcher for 23 years, I am amazed at the advances in air (space) navigation. When I started in 1959, LF airways were still around and VORs were just taking over. In the 1990s when we pioneered "over the pole" airways from the US and Europe to Asia we were still using INS. It would experience a few minutes of being "lost" when directly over the North Pole. We encountered that when operating the proving runs prior to certification.
This could also be a navigation system for spacecraft or surface rovers for example around the moon or Mars. Initialize it from time to time on a known location, maybe due to accurately located surface features and you have your position any time available.
Thinking a bit out if the box of Earth ;-)
Nice to see inertial systems getting some love, nice job explaining the system and how they work in a basic sense.
From Oct 1959 to Aug 1965 I was assigned to the Test and Development of the B-58 Hustler, a Supersonic Delta Wing Bomber in the USAF, as an aircraft Mechanic. That aircraft have an Astronaut Tracker as well as two IRS. In the future all commercial and military aircraft.
Laser-ring or fibre-optic gyros not being standard equipment on aircraft is effectively criminal cost-cutting.
Around 30 years ago, I was working for a major aerospace contractor on DoD and NASA projects. I seem to remember that they were working on a system that used the different signature radiation patterns of various stars to determine your position. I don't know if they ever perfected it though.
It may be worth mentioning that 'dead reckoning' is actually a sort of abbreviation for 'deduced reckoning'. If you know your starting point and you know the speed, direction and time of travel you can deduce where you are.