Have you ever used your car GPS on an airplane?

In the air, I wouldn’t try it on other than a private plane. If you try it on a commercial airliner in the US (in the air, anyway) and you’re found out, you’ll probably be talking to the Air Marshals at your destination. Confiscation of the device would be the least of your worries.

I searously doubt it would be like that cyanotic but I wouldn’t try it. I’m sure it wouldn’t work. They probaly wouldn’t alow you to take it anyways.

TSA and Homeland Security may take it a an attempt to take down the plane and you could be talking a long time with Bubba at the Fed Pen.

@CyanoticWasp – air marshals? Come on man. Delta’s website even states that GPS systems are okay to use when the plane has “reached its cruising altitude.” @Tropical_Willie – I have no intentions of doing anything illegal. I just wanted to see if a GPS unit will plot my location while flying from coast to coast, to get an estimated time remaining on the flight, and see if it will calculate the airspeed.

I’d like to hear an answer from someone who has done this or at least knows what they are talking about.

Okay, I stand corrected, based on your link. I had assumed that such a device would not be permitted to be used in flight.

@xBRIANx: I wish I knew the answer to your question. It seems like it would work, since GPS devices communicate with satellites. Cell phones don’t work because the cell towers are on the ground, but satellites are out in space.

Since it sounds like you’re planning to fly soon, I would totally try it! Tell us what happens!

@CyanoticWasp: Didn’t anyone ever teach you what happens when you assume?

I tried it once. It couldn’t pick up a signal.

I did it in our little private plane. It was kind of funny. It kept finding roads over these mountain hills. We kept saying we should ride the motorcycle back to those places but we never did. We put our home address in it. It kept trying to change course.

@La_chica_gomela I will give it a shot next month with a Garmin and see what happens. I’ll try to remember to post my results here. I’m hoping it’ll at least calculate speed and/or approx location. I always am wondering what cornfields I am looking at when I fly over Kansas at 30,000 ft.

For those of you who are still watching this thread… so I went on my trip to California. Tried the Garmin GPS both ways and it never connected to a Satellite. Strange. It worked in the terminal but once I got on the plane, even at the gate, it lost the satellite reception. I wonder if the plane was equipped with a GPS jammer or something. We were on a 747.

@xBRIANx, it must be, because mine worked fine in a private plane.