A U-2 Dragon Lady flies above the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range, California, Mar. 23, 2016. U.S. Air Force/Staff Sgt. Robert M. Trujillo
Defense One: Russian and Chinese Satellites Are Helping US Pilots Spy on Russia and China
U-2 pilots are wearing watches that connect to foreign satellites, giving them backup navigation when GPS is jammed.
American U-2 spy plane pilots, who have long flown bleeding-edge technology to the edge of Earth’s atmosphere, have a new high-tech gadget: a watch that receives satellite navigation coordinates from Russian, Chinese, and European satellites.
It serves as a backup to U.S. Global Positioning System satellites, in case their signal becomes unavailable.
“My U-2 guys fly with a watch now that ties into GPS, but also BeiDou and the Russian [GLONASS] system and the European [Galileo] system so that if somebody jams GPS, they still get the others,” Gen. James “Mike” Holmes, head of Air Combat Command, said Wednesday at a McAleese and Associates conference in Washington.
The general mentioned the watch as an example of building redundancies into military equipment.
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WNU Editor: I would love to have one of those "watches" when I go sailing.
Try the Garmin Instinct. I think you can get it on Amazon.
ReplyDeleteIt would be interesting if that enabled the Russian and Chinese satellites to track track the users.
ReplyDelete