Originally Posted by
Steve B.
There was a story many years back of a Lear jet that disappeared around Christmas time while attempting to fly into Lebanon, NH to PU a family to fly them on vacation. Plane never made it and it was a good 2 years before they found it NE of Lebanon in deep woods on a hillside. The NTSB investigation indicated the pilots were relying too much on a newly installed GPS that they had very little familiarity with in flight conditions, they subsequently lost track of position and altitude, flew into a mountain at 250 MPH. And there have been countless stories of motorists that drive up an Oregon dirt road (or something similar) into snow and get stuck, while following the directions Google Maps is giving them. A lot of people have no idea how it all works and why it sometimes doesn't, including pilots, who should know better.
All these stories are still relatively rare. In a pool of billions of uses.
The fact that a relatively small number of people still get into trouble is not an indication of it being "unreliable".
People manage to crash airplanes and drive up dirt roads without GPS. It wouldn't surprise me that GPS gave people more confidence to get into trouble but it's still
really rare.
These aren’t even “GPS problems”. The “dirt road proble” might be a map problem but we really don’t know (it could be a “person ignoring the road they are in is dirt problem “).