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Safety and Mountain Flying

GPS Outages across New Mexico
J Woods

On Jan 1, 2024, I was out flying safety pilot for a couple approaches, one at AEG and one at GNT. On both approaches and several times in between, we encountered GPS "NO POSITION" warnings. They were intermittent the full hour we were flying. There was no NOTAM for an outage on KABQ, KAEG, or KGNT.


Oct 27, 2023, a few of us flew from KAEG to KDMN and returning Sat Oct 28 after flying Young Eagles.. There was a Friday NOTAM at KTCS for a 2 hour GPS outage. Listening to Center, multiple commercial pilots checked in, complaining of GPS outages, unaware of the NOTAM. Center controllers repeatedly explained the outage, distracting from their core job. At least two airliners asked for vectors because they were on GPS routes. You could hear their frustration. For us, we just wished we'd asked for relative positions before Center dropped us so we could better manage our landing sequence. Although well equipped with ADSB and GPS, I fell back on the VOR and roads to find the airport and communicate my position. Good thing we all complied with the 2020 mandate!


All summer, most of my trips to southwestern Colorado included outages. Calling Center, they were surprised and thought it would end just north of Albuquerque. Nope! All the way past Durango and into Montrose. You could bet on it.


Not sure what should be done. I understand and respect that testing may be needed and it's safer to do it in the daytime than at night. . . but it's sure FREQUENT and WIDESPREAD.


I would like to see us collect data on GPS outages. Note if there's a NOTAM or not. For now, please reply to this thread. Or should we set up a Google Sheet?

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