You are also involved in the Galileo project -- Europe's rival to GPS.
Yes, it's been building up for the last two years. There is a precursor project called EGNOS which is funded by the aviation community - to take GPS information and broadcast correction and fault information so that GPS would be sufficiently reliable for aviation. That has been funded for about seven years and we've been involved in that from the start.
Who's paying for Galileo?
It is government funded because at the moment there is a free system available - GPS - that is paid for by the American government. So there is no way you can justify private sector funding since its competitor is free. Governments around Europe have recognised this. They are going to use a Private Finance Initiative (PFI) model to try to bring in some private finance but basically most of the cost will be underwritten by the private sector.
Why does Europe, and European airlines in particular, need its own satellite navigation system. Isn't GPS robust enough?
It's a military system - no guarantees. You're welcome to use it, but if it happens to be not working perfectly - then sorry, tough luck. With the EGNOS system, the aviation communities in America, Europe and Japan are making an investment in what is effectively ground infrastructure that monitors the satellites and if they detect a problem they can check it out. You have these reference receivers - you know where they are - and they are checking if GPS gives their position correctly all the time. Any faults or corrections are then broadcast via a commercial satellite (Inmarsat) and can be picked up by commercial aircraft.
So civilian aircraft require a more robust system than the military?
It's sad but military are prepared to accept the odd [glitch]... well, I suppose it's because military activities don't go on 24/7, 365 days a year. So they can't really justify the sort of reliability that the civil aviation community has to have. The military might accept 99.9 percent liability but for civil aviation you have to add a couple of nines on... five nines probably.
So is Galileo more advanced than GPS or just different?
It's a bit more advanced. But also it's just the fact that there will be more satellites, so it will be more reliable. [Galileo will have 27 satellites versus GPS's 24]. But they are very much complimentary. For the user, it's more and better rather than instead of.
