En route to the South Pole
2014-12-10
Inbound to the South Pole station, the navigator sits in the cockpit behind the pilot and co-pilot. Day-to-day operations use the array of fixed instruments and a Toughbook with specialized navigation software. Though paper charts are at hand, the ultimate dependency is still technological: the United States Air Force is sufficiently confident that their GPS satellites will never be compromised that their air navigators have not been taught celestial navigation since the 1990s.