Where did I leave that DME?
Wouldn't it be amazing if we had a terrestrial navigation system that would be able to give us GPS level accuracy with very little cost. Imagine a system like that. Oh wait, we had that (LORAN), and the government decided we didn't need that
The LORAN stations will need to be reactivated for the ADS-B system- except that it'll be all new hardware, software, power hook-ups, and probably locations too
Wouldn't it be amazing if we had a terrestrial navigation system that would be able to give us GPS level accuracy with very little cost. Imagine a system like that. Oh wait, we had that (LORAN), and the government decided we didn't need that
Wouldn't it be amazing if we had a terrestrial navigation system that would be able to give us GPS level accuracy with very little cost. Imagine a system like that. Oh wait, we had that (LORAN), and the government decided we didn't need that
"...GPS level accuracy..."???
Meh, according to all the "old timers" that used LORAN, it didn't work in the rain. I'd rather have the GPS. Not only that, but the LORAN infrastructure was difficult to maintain and expensive. I suspect that GPS provides worldwide coverage for a similar cost. Also, consider the accuracy of a GPS system, I've seen accuracies of as good as two meters... LORAN wasn't quite that good.
I was thinking the same thing. Anybody who has flown with LORAN knows it isn't as accurate as GPS, unless you consider accuracy of 1 mile to be the same as a few meters.
NIts the next and closest thing to GPS accuracy. Darn near very close. In descending order, GPS and LORAN accuracy were the top......LORAN being about 200m accuracy at best. Following that, you have TACAN at about 400m, an unaided INS at about 700m following 1 hour drift, VOR/DME and Doppler systems at about 1000m, and the old VLF/OMEGA at about 2500m.
So LORAN wasn't all that bad, all things considered.
And had we kept LORAN, we could have upgraded the whole system to eLORAN, for much less than the price of a single GPS satellite, and had accuracy to 10meters or so. Everytime I used it, it was great. Sure, may not have been something I wanted to use IFR, but just out and about in VFR conditions, it worked as well as a handheld GPS did.
Not necessarily there junior (a 22 yr old saying "meh" over something he's never used....). LORAN worked fine in the rain, I never had any problems with it. LORAN-C was a good improvement over the former LORAN-A and was good in capability.